Daily Inspiration Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Brooks is poking at a particular kind of cultural mirage: the way polish can masquerade as depth. The line flatters and needles at once. “Not that the French are not profound” grants France its reputation for ideas, then immediately turns the knife: their real talent is expression so elegant it upgrades ordinary thoughts into something we mistake for genius. The image does the work. A goose is competent, noisy, useful; a swan is rarefied, aesthetic, mythic. Brooks isn’t claiming the French have no swans. He’s warning that their geese arrive already costumed.

The subtext is less about France than about the Anglophone audience trained to be dazzled by French fluency: salons, essays, aphorisms, the social prestige of seeming clever. Style becomes a delivery system for authority. If a sentence lands with confidence and grace, we grant it gravitas, even when the underlying idea is merely serviceable. Brooks, a critic formed in an American culture perpetually measuring itself against Europe, is also scolding his own side: we’re the ones doing the misrecognizing.

It’s an argument about rhetoric as soft power. Nations don’t just export goods; they export tones of mind. French intellectual culture, in Brooks’s telling, excels at turning thought into performance, and performance into assumed profundity. The quip also doubles as a critic’s credo: the job is to separate plumage from substance, to hear the honk beneath the aria.