AN AMERICAN CRITIC: VAN WYCK BROOKS
THERE is one type of critic who is more important to a country than all but the greatest of its artists, and he is the one who by his criticism creates the conditions in which the artist can work and flourish as a free spirit. Creating these conditions is not within the power of the purely aesthetic critic; this can only be achieved by the man who is both a social critic and an aesthetic critic—a social critic who has a sense of history and an aesthetic critic who is a philosopher and a psychologist. It is a rare enough combination, but America has produced it in Van Wyck Brooks—a mind that is so especially the product of America that, from one point of view, he might be said to be the most purely American writer.
He seems to be able to wake up every morning and regard America, and everybody who ever wrote in America, or who signified anything in American life, with fresh, eager, and ever-interested eyes. His mind perpetually revolves around the idea of a national culture in America, and he pursues all sides of the subject with such a vividness of interest and vividness of language, that when you have read three or four of his books, you begin to believe that the creation of such a culture is one of the few causes left worthy of the devotion and self-sacrifice of men. Lessing was once able to make almost all Germany feel like that about German culture, and W. B. Yeats and A. E. were able to make almost all Ireland feel like that about Irish culture. It is obvious that a writer who can make people feel like this has an intensely national quality. It is obvious also that a writer with his combination of gifts is of an order of critics rare in literature in English. He represents rather the Continental European conception of a critic—a conception which has never been partial to the idea of a critic as simply a manufacturer of literary or aesthetic standards, or as a maker of rules and regulations for artists to follow. The Anglo-Saxon idea of a critic, when not regarding him as a censor of morals, is as a formulator of aesthetic standards and a corrector of taste. Criticism
