NEW ENGLAND: INDIAN SUMMER—Van Wyck Brooks—Dutton ($3.75).
During the '20s and '30s, Critic Van Wyck Brooks pondered a theory and a project. His project was to write a synthesis of U. S. culture in terms of the New England mind. The theory, used chiefly as a literary framework for the project, was German Philosopher Oswald Spengler's theory of cultural cycles: that cultures, like individuals, pass through youth and maturity to old age and death. Cultures are born in the countryside among "a homogeneous people, living close to the soil, intensely religious. . . . There is a springtime feeling in the air . . . a mo ment of equipoise, a widespread flowering of the imagination. . . ." This moment in New England's culture Van Wyck Brooks fixed superbly in The Flowering of New England (1936).
This week Van Wyck Brooks made U. S literary history again by publishing his New England: Indian Summer. One thing was clear about the book at first reading: it is itself a great work of literature. With The Flowering of New England it formed a living body of cultural tradition. Georg Brandes and Benedetto Croce had tried to do a similar critical work for European culture. But Brooks's re-creation of the human side of New England, of the lives, characters, appearance, crotchets of his heroes, and of the landscape through which they moved, is dramatically crowd ed with people and characterization, incident and humor as are only a few great novels.
New England: Indian Summer opens sombrely with America's Tragic Era, 1865. The Civil War — "Mrs. Stowe's war," Lincoln liked to call it — was won. The great and near-great figures of New England's flowering had been up to their transcendental ears in Abolitionism and underground railroading. But with the thrill of victory came a chill realization that it was not the same country. It was not even quite the same New England. The slave power was gone, but the bankers remained. Most of the young men were dead or gone West. The New England mind recoiled from the consequences of victory with the same instinctive consternation that made Henry Adams recoil from U. S. Grant. Wrote Henry Adams, describing his and his father's return after a decade in England: "Had they been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1,000, landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world so changed."
So New England withdrew into itself. Sometimes brilliantly, sometimes querulously, then more & more complacently, it spent the next half century dying. The flowering was over: chill autumn had set in.