around them, instead of looking to Europe for literary models. The first writer to break decisively with genteel conventions, Whitman became the "precipitant" of a new American culture. His example made it possible for Americans to begin to re-create some of the "happy excitement of European thought" simply by overcoming their obsession with its superiority.

This analysis of the derivative and "colonial" character of American literature no doubt had salutary effects, but the concerns behind it distorted Brooks's view of cultural history. His preoccupation with the "genteel tradition," as George Santayana called it, made it impossible for him to see any value in the tradition of radical Protestantism exemplified by Edwards, Emerson, and William James or to recognize the kinship between his predecessors' concerns and some of his own. They were just as impatient as he was with a metaphysical approach to moral questions that made no contact with practical experience. Yet Brooks could see "puritanism," one of his favorite targets, only as another expression of the genteel tradition, pragmatism as its equally unsatisfactory antithesis—a crude celebration of practical results. The two movements, as Brooks saw them, typified the extremes between which Americans continued to drift. As early as the eighteenth century, they found their respective spokesmen in Edwards—"intellect unchecked"—and Benjamin Franklin, the practical man par excellence. Between them, Edwards and Franklin summed up the "experience of New England," an "experience of two extremes—bare facts and metaphysics." What was missing, Brooks insisted, was "experience of the world, of society, of art, the genial middle ground of human tradition."

Brooks took too much of his indictment of American culture from Santayana and too little from James, with whom he also studied at Harvard. His attempt to find a "genial middle ground" between the "highbrow" and "lowbrow"—Santayana's categories again—led him to ignore James's more incisive analysis of cultural "desiccation." James too wanted to "bring the ideal into things"—more specifically, to "restore to philosophy the temper of science and practical life." He too condemned a "Sunday Christianity" that had no effect on everyday conduct. In view of his well-known opposition to the "bitch-goddess, success," it is safe to say that he would have endorsed Brooks's statement that the American writer's failure "to move the soul of America from the accumulation of

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