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...ENGLAND: INDIAN SUMMER-Van Wyck Brooks-Dutton...
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...
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...
STARS ON THE SEA-F. van Wyck Mason-Lippincotf ($2.75). The season's most successful costume fiction and plenty of it, concerned with the fledgling glories of the U. S. fleet at Newport, Charleston and Santo Domingo in the brave days of '76. F. van Wyck Mason has the prettiest ear extant for racy Colonial speech; his sense of character is lively, though it is closer to The American Boy than to perfection; his yarns are rattling good, and if anyone wants to see where the romantic conception of an Indian fighter has got to in the last...
...Wordsworths; The Romantic Rebels: Byron, Shelley, Keats; Poor Splendid Wings: the Rossettis) it is also a reminder of Biographer Winwar's uncommon skill in portraying the pre-Wilde period. At its best, her book does for the decadent flowering of England's Nineties what Van Wyck Brooks did for the flowering of New England...