culture, like other luxury goods, had to be imported from Europe. The excessive individualism of the frontier "prevented the formation of a collective spiritual life" and "despoiled us of that instinctive human reverence for those divine reservoirs of collective experience, religion, science, art, philosophy, the self-subordinating service of which is almost the measure of human happiness."

The social division of labor between the "machinery of self-preservation and the mystery of life" coincided with a sexual division of labor that made women the principal custodians of art and religion. "We have in America two publics, the cultivated public and the business public, the public of theory and the public of activity, the public that reads Maeterlinck and the public that accumulates money: the one largely feminine, the other largely masculine." Having made women the arbiters of polite taste, even serious writers like Mark Twain and William Dean Howells submitted to female censorship. Literature became genteel; it confined itself, in Howells's notorious phrase, to the "smiling aspects of American life." The spirit of Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly presided over American letters.

Laying about him with gusto, Brooks ridiculed the literary worthies— Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier—venerated by those who confused culture with high-minded sentiments unconnected with everyday experience. Even Hawthorne and Poe, who might have flourished in a more congenial atmosphere, retreated into their "diaphanous private worlds," according to Brooks. Emerson too was stunted by his surroundings. A "ventriloquist," an "attenuated voice coming from a great distance," Emerson was "abstract at the wrong times and concrete at the wrong times." He "presided over and gave its tone" to a "world of infinite social fragmentation and unlimited free will." His style, overpraised by undiscriminating admirers, illustrated the difference between "literary English in England," a "living speech" that occupied the "middle of the field" and expressed the "flesh and blood of an evolving race," and literary English in America, which merely reflected the "prestige and precedent and the will and habit of a dominating class."

Of all the nineteenth-century American writers, Whitman alone escaped Brooks's censure. In spite of Whitman's uneasiness "on the plane of ideas" and his inclination to affirm everything indiscriminately, he taught American intellectuals to seek their inspiration in the common life

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