Whatever may be Mr Van Wyck Brooks's distinctive mark in the contemporary American literary world, the five-volume work that comes to a close with The Confident Years seems to me to be in an essential respect very representative—representative, I mean, of a prevailing climate: while it is, to a portentous tune, inflationary in tendency, it at the same time shows an indifference to the real American achievement. The indifference must be judged to be unawareness, and if one asks how such unawareness could be preserved by a critic intention exalting and magnifying an established American literature, the explanation is to be seen in the nature of the inflationary bent itself. (p. 138)
The very contemporary spirit of Mr Van Wyck Brooks's survey as a whole is given in the adjective of his concluding title, The Confident Years. The confidence asserting itself in the years covered by the volume (1885–1915)—confidence that an American literature was emerging—has, in this subsequent period, Mr Brooks's own, been beyond question vindicated: here we have the implicit position (it is explicit enough too) from which Mr Brooks writes. But while this confidence, as he rests upon it, is so patently a convinced assumption of ample grounds, standing undeniably there (so to speak) in the public world—too undeniably, in fact, to need demonstrating—its essential character is to be wholly without definition. That is, it doesn't express itself in terms of any considered or considerable ideas of what a literature, or a significant work, might be; it is wholly unrelated to any such ideas—to anything that can properly be called a conception at all (for a positive conception must surely have an examinable content).
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