and beliefs and ideas, but positively to cry up the beliefs and taste of the herd."
The Ordeal of Mark Twain is not only the spiritual history of a man; it is almost the spiritual history of the American people. This and Letters and Leadership, out of all his books, are the most impressive, and, after reading them, one cannot but realize that Van Wyck Brooks belongs to the highest order of critics. He has given a conception of literature and life that is as fine and inspiring as any in that order. Where he falls below them is in intensity of temperament and emotion. Not until we come to his book on Mark Twain—his last published book—do we get what he himself calls "the deep, shaking impact of personality" that we encounter in the great critics as well as in the great artists; we do indeed get it there, but it is not often reinforced by that intensity, that almost wildness of emotion, that thrills us in the work of the great European critics. In comparison with them he seems a little cool and self-possessed. We cannot imagine him capable of shining, reckless enthusiasms, or capable of allowing his mind to wander off into that yearning and almost foolish ecstasy that Taine wanders into over Alfred de Musset. Perhaps, to many this will not seem a very great drawback, but for my own part, I feel sure that the whole secret of a rich and nervous and swiftly-moving style such as Taine's lies just in that capacity for sublime emotional folly. Van Wyck Brooks, measured with these great Europeans, has an American sedateness. But measured with him contemporary critics writing in English seem narrow and limited in ideas, lacking in the sense of reality and the power of inspiring others. While many of the best-known of them are obsessed with trivial aesthetic theories, he, almost alone, has related literature to life. His influence in America has been far-reaching; almost every one of the recent American writers whose work is of value, owes him something. His ideas have reached places where their origin is unsuspected—the usual fate of original criticism. Taking his work as a whole, one comes from it with a firm belief in the lasting validity of his ideas and in the lasting service he is rendering to American literature—to that literature of whose flowering he dreamed in his very first book. . . . "I think a day will come when the names of Denver and Sioux City will have a traditional and antique dignity like Damascus and Perugia." It is well that the critic, too, should write out of a dream.
