that he considers real, he has a sort of bleak, unsatisfied admiration. He calls this chapter on Whitman The Precipitant, because "he precipitated the American character." "All those things which had been separate, self-sufficient, inco-ordinate—action, theory, idealism, business—he cast into a crucible; and they emerged, harmonious and molten, in a fresh democratic ideal, which is based upon the whole personality." He made fast what he himself called "The idea and fact of American Totality." Whitman, for Mr Brooks, fulfils what he calls the functions of a poet in the most primitive sense of the word—a man who gives to a nation a certain focal centre in the consciousness of its own character. Whitman is in fact for him what none of the other great American writers, except Emerson, approach to being—a leader. He fulfils in his own personality what is, for Mr Brooks, one of the conditions of the creation of a great American culture—the substitution of the ideal of self-fulfilment for the ideal of self-assertion. Whitman had no doubts about the necessity for the triumph of the creative mind: the terror which he must have caused still reverberates in sections of American society—sections for whom the creative mind represents the mind of a vagrant—something outcast from civilized life.
If Whitman's life was almost a complete success as far as self-fulfilment is concerned, Mark Twain's was, as he shows, almost a complete failure. I can think of no other biographical study of a literary man written in our time which is such a masterpiece as Mr Brooks' book on Mark Twain. One remembers Chesterton's beautiful book on Browning, but the writing of that must have been child's play in comparison with the writing of The Ordeal of Mark Twain . . . a work in which the author evolves a new method, by grafting on the methods of Taine and Sainte Beuve the discoveries of psychoanalysis. The result is a study the thoroughness of which has never been surpassed. The man, and through the man, the writer is laid bare to us in every corner of his soul, in every cell of his brain, almost in every pulse of his heart. Mr Brooks shows us Mark Twain as a great unfulfilled satirist. "He was intended by nature to be a sort of American Rabelais, who would have done as regards the financial commercialism of The Gilded Age, very much what the author of Pantagruel did as regards the obsolescent medi- aevalism of the sixteenth century. But instead Mark Twain became involved in the 'popular complex of the Gilded Age' in which one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes
