Education Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Brooks is doing something sly here: he attacks “carping” not as a bad habit but as a social performance staged by the insecure. The phrase “people of small caliber” isn’t merely an insult; it’s a diagnostic category. In Brooks’s world, the chronic nitpicker isn’t guarding standards so much as guarding status. “Always” makes the behavior feel compulsive, like a tic. Criticism becomes less an act of judgment than an act of self-advertisement.

The key move is the motive he assigns: they’re “bent on showing” superiority. That verb matters. Bent suggests a fixed posture, a body angled toward display. Brooks then lists the props of respectable authority - “knowledge or prowess or good breeding” - and in that escalation you can hear his disdain for genteel culture’s way of weaponizing taste. “Good breeding” is the quiet tell: he’s talking about a class-coded kind of fault-finding, the sort that passes as refinement while policing who gets to belong.

As a critic writing in a period when American letters were still negotiating Europe’s shadow and America’s own hierarchies, Brooks is defending criticism’s higher purpose by separating it from mere sneering. He’s not anti-standards; he’s anti-posturing. The subtext is a warning to his own profession: if critique becomes an identity badge, it shrinks the critic and the culture at the same time. In a marketplace that rewards takedowns, Brooks insists that constant contempt is not sophistication - it’s smallness dressed up as discernment.