Company, 1948.
"Kipling" was first published in The Nation, October 16, 1943.
"The Immortality Ode" was read before the English Institute, September 1941, and first published in The English Institute Annual, 1941, New York, Columbia University Press, 1942.
"Art and Neurosis" was first published in Partisan Review, Winter,
1945; some of the material added in the present version appeared in
The New Leader, December 13, 1947.
Bibliographical Note
-11·-·-··-··-··-··-·-·-··-··-··-·-··-··-··-·-··-··-··-·-··-·-··-··
"The Sense of the Past" was read before the English Graduate Union
of Columbia University in February 1942, and first published in Partisan ReviellJ, May-June 1942.
"Tacitus Now" was first published in The Nation, August 22, 1942.
"Manners, Morals, and the Novel" was read at the Conference on the
Contents
Heritage of the English-speaking Peoples and Their Responsibilities,
at Kenyon College, September 1947, and first published in The Kenyon
Review, Winter, 1948.
"The Kinsey Report" was first published in Partisan Review, April 1948.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald" was first published in The Nation, April 25,
1945; some of the material added in the present version first appeared in
the introduction to The Great Gatsby, New York, New Directions, 1945.
"Art and Fortune" was read before the English Institute, September
Preface
Vll
1948, and first published in Partisan Review, December 1948.
xv
"The Meaning of a Literary Idea" was read at the Conference in Ameri
Bibliographical Note
can Literature at the University of Rochester, February 1949, and first
published in The American Quarterly, Fall, 1949.
Reality in America
3
Sherwood Anderson
2I
Freud and Literature
33
The Princess Casamassima
56
The Function of the Little Magazine
89
Huckleberry Finn
IOO
Kipling
II3
The Immortality Ode
123
Art and Neurosis
152
The Sense of the Past
172
Tacitus Now
187
Contents
-·------·-·----·-·-·-·-·-·-··--·-··-··--·-·-··-··
Manners, Morals, and the Novel
193
The Kinsey Report
2IO
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Liberal Imagination
Art and Fortune
The Meaning of a Literary Idea
I
IT IS possible to say of V. L. Parrington that with his Main
Currents in American Thought he has had an influence on our
conception of American culture which is not equaled by that
of any other writer of the last two decades. His ideas are now the
accepted ones wherever the college course in American literature is
given by a teacher who conceives himself to be opposed to the genteel and the academic and in alliance with the vigorous and the actual. And whenever the liberal historian of America finds occasion
to take account of the national literature, as nowadays he feels it
proper to do, it is Parrington who is his standard and guide. Parrington's ideas are the more firmly established because they do not have to be imposed-the teacher or the critic who presents them is
likely to find that his task is merely to make articulate for his audience what it has always believed, for Parrington formulated in a classic way the suppositions about our culture which are held by the
American middle class so far as that class is at all liberal in its
social thought and so far as it begins to understand that literature
has anything to do with society.
Parrington was not a great mind; he was not a precise thinker or,
except when measured by the low eminences that were about him,
an impressive one. Separate Parrington from his informing idea of
the economic and social determination of thought and what is left
is a simple intelligence, notable for its generosity and enthusiasm
but certainly not for its accuracy or originality. Take him even with
4
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Reality in America
5
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his idea and he is, once its direction is established, rather too pre
Reality; Fig. 2, Artist; Fig. 1', Work of Art. Figs. 1 and 1' are nordictable to be continuously interesting; and, indeed, what we digmally in virtual correspondence with each other. Sometimes the nify with the name of economic and social determinism amounts
artist spoils this ideal relation by "turning away from" reality. This
in his use of it to not much more than the demonstration that most
results in certain fantastic works, unreal and ultimately useless. It
writers incline to stick to their own social class. But his best virtue
does not occur to Parrington that there is any other relation possible
was real and important-he had what we like to think of as the
between the artist and reality than this passage of reality through
saving salt of the American mind, the lively sense of the practical,
the transparent artist; he meets evidence of imagination and creaworkaday world, of the welter of ordinary undistinguished things tiveness with a settled hostility the expression of which suggests that
and people, of the tangible, quirky, unrefined elements of life. He
he regards them as the natural enemies of democracy.
knew what so many literary historians do not know, that emotions
In this view of things, reality, although it is always reliable, is
and ideas are the sparks that fly when the mind meets difficulties.
always rather sober-sided, even grim. Parrington, a genial and en
Yet he had after all but a limited sense of what constitutes a diffithusiastic man, can understand how the generosity of man's hopes culty. Whenever he was confronted with a work of art that was
and desires may leap beyond reality; he admires will in the degree
complex, personal and not literal, that was not, as it were, a public
that he suspects mind. To an excess of desire and energy which
document, Parrington was at a loss. Difficulties that were compliblinds a man to the limitations of reality he can indeed be very cated by personality or that were expressed in the language of suctender. This is one of the many meanings he gives to romance or cessful art did not seem quite real to him and he was inclined to
romanticism, and in spite of himself it appeals to something in his
treat them as aberrations, which is one way of saying what everyown nature. The praise of Cabell is Parrington's response not only body admits, that the weakest part of Parrington's talent was his
to Cabell's elegance-for Parrington loved elegance-but also to
aesthetic judgment. His admirers and disciples like to imply that
Cabell's insistence on the part which a beneficent self-deception may
his errors of aesthetic judgment are merely lapses of taste, but this
and even should play in the disappointing fact-bound life of man,
is not so. Despite such mistakes as his notorious praise of Cabell, to
&
nbsp; particularly in the private and erotic part of his life.1
whom in a remarkable passage he compares Melville, Parrington's
The second volume of Main Currents is called The Romantic
taste was by no means bad. His errors are the errors of understand
Revolution in America and it is natural to expect that the word
ing which arise from his assumptions about the nature of reality.
romantic should appear in it frequently. So it does, more frequently
Parrington does not often deal with abstract philosophical ideas,
than one can count, and seldom with the same meaning, seldom
but whenever he approaches a work of art we are made aware of the
with the sense that the word, although scandalously vague as it has
metaphysics on which his aesthetics is based. There exists, he bebeen used by the literary historians, is still full of complicated but lieves, a thing called reality; it is one and immutable, it is wholly
not wholly pointless ideas, that it involves many contrary but deexternal, it is irreducible. Men's minds may waver, but reality is alfinable things; all too often Parrington uses the word romantic with ways reliable, always the same, always easily to be known. And the
the word romance close at hand, meaning a romance, in the sens�
artist's relation to reality he conceives as a simple one. Reality being
fixed and given, the artist has but to let it pass through him, he is
1 See, for example, how Parrington accounts for the "idealizing mind"-Melville's
the lens in the first diagram of an elementary book on optics: Fig.
-:-by the discrepancy between "a wife in her morning kimono" and "the Helen of
1,
h,s dreams." Vol. 11, p. 259.
6
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Reality in America
7
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that Graustark or Treasure Island is a romance, as though it signi
Just as for Parrington there is a saving grace and a venial sin,
fied chiefly a gay disregard of the limitations of everyday fact.
there is also a deadly sin, and this is turning away from reality, not
Romance is refusing to heed the counsels of experience (p. iii); it is
in the excess of generous feeling, but in what he believes to be a deebullience (p. iv); it is utopianism (p. iv); it is individualism ficiency of feeling, as with Hawthorne, or out of what amounts to
(p. vi); it is self-deception (p. 59)-"romantic faith ... in the
sinful pride, as with Henry James. He tells us that there was too
beneficent processes of trade and industry" ( as held, we inevitably
much realism in Hawthorne to allow him to give his faith to the
ask, by the romantic Adam Smith?); it is the love of the picturesque
transcendental reformers: "he was too much of a realist to change
(p. 49); it is the dislike of innovation (p. 50) but also the love of
fashions in creeds"; "he remained cold to the revolutionary criticism
change (p. iv); it is the sentimental (p. 192); it is patriotism, and
that was eager to pull down the old temples to make room for
then it is cheap (p. 235). It may be used to denote what is not classinobler." It is this cold realism, keeping Hawthorne apart from his cal, but chiefly it means that which ignores reality (pp. ix, 136, 143,
enthusiastic contemporaries, that alienates Parrington's sympathy147, and passim); it is not critical (pp. 225,235), although in speak
"Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion
ing of Cooper and Melville, Parrington admits that criticism can
the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so
sometimes spring from romanticism.
long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the
Whenever a man with whose ideas he disagrees wins from
shadow of a dream. And so while the Concord thinkers were pro·
Parrington a reluctant measure of respect, the word romantic is
claiming man to be the indubitable child of God, Hawthorne was
likely to appear. He does not admire Henry Clay, yet something in
critically examining the question of evil as it appeared in the light
Clay is not to be despised-his romanticism, although Clay's roof his own experience. It was the central fascinating problem of his manticism is made equivalent with his inability to "come to grips
intellectual life, and in pursuit of a solution he probed curiously into
with reality." Romanticism is thus, in most of its signfications, the
the hidden, furtive recesses of the soul." Parrington's disapproval of
venial sin of Main Currents; like carnal passion in the Inferno, it
the enterprise is unmistakable.
evokes not blame but tender sorrow. But it can also be the great and
Now we might wonder whether Hawthorne's questioning of the
saving virtue which Parrington recognizes. It is ascribed to the
naive and often eccentric faiths of the transcendental reformers was
transcendental reformers he so much admires; it is said to mark two
not, on the face of it, a public service. But Parrington implies that it
of his most cherished heroes, Jefferson and Emerson: "they were
contributes nothing to democracy, and even that it stands in the
both romantics and their idealism was only a different expression of
way of the realization of democracy. If democracy depends wholly
a common spirit." Parrington held, we may say, at least two differon a fighting faith, I suppose he is right. Yet society is after all ent views of romanticism which suggest two different views of resomething that exists at the moment as well as in the future, and if ality. Sometimes he speaks of reality in an honorific way, meaning
one man wants to probe curiously into the hidden furtive recesses of
the substantial stuff of life, the ineluctable facts with which the
the contemporary soul, a broad democracy and especially one demind must cope, but sometimes he speaks of it pejoratively and voted to reality should allow him to do so without despising him. If
means the world of established social forms; and he speaks of realwhat Hawthorne did was certainly nothing to build a party on, we ism in two ways: sometimes as the pawer of dealing intelligently
ought perhaps to forgive him when we remember that he was only
with fact, sometimes as a cold and conservative resistance to idealism.
one man and that the future of mankind did not depend upon him
8
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
Reality in America
9
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alone. But this very fact serves only to irritate Parrington; he is put
orthodoxies of dissent and tell us so much about the nature of moral
out by Hawthorne's loneliness and believes that part of Hawthorne's
zeal, is of course dealing exactly with reality.
insufficiency as a writer comes from his failure to get around and
Parrington's characteristic weakness as a historian is suggested by
meet people. Hawthorne could not, he tells us, establish contact with
the title of his famous book, for the culture of a nation is not truly
the "Yankee reality," and was scarcely aware of the "substantial
figured in the image of the current. A culture is not a flow, nor even
world of Puritan reality that Samuel Sewall knew."
a
confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate
To turn from reality might mean to turn to romance, but Parringit is nothing if not a dialectic. And in any culture there are likely to ton tells us that Hawthorne was romantic "only in a narrow and
be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within
very special sense." He was not interested in the world of, as it were,
themselves, their mean_ing and power lying in their contradictions;
practical romance, in the Salem of the clipper ships; from this he
they contain within themselves, it may be said, the very essence of
turned away to create "a romance of ethics." This is not an illumithe culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve nating phrase but it is a catching one, and it might be taken to mean
the ends of any one ideological group or tendency. It is a significant
that Hawthorne was in the tradition of, say, Shakespeare; but we
circumstance of American culture, and one which is susceptible of
quickly learn that, no, Hawthorne had entered a barren field, for
explanation, that an unusually large proportion of its notable writers
although he himself lived in the present and had all the future to
of the nineteenth century were such repositories of the dialectic of
mold, he preferred to find many of his subjects in the past. We learn
their times-they contained both the yes and the no of their culture,
too that his romance of ethics is not admirable because it requires
and by that token they were prophetic of the future. Parrington said
the hard, fine pressing of ideas, and we are told that "a romantic
that he had not set up shop as a literary critic; but if a literary critic
uninterested in adventure and afraid of sex is likely to become
is simply a reader who has the ability to understand literature and to
somewhat graveled for matter." In short, Hawthorne's mind was a
convey to others what he understands, it is not exactly a matter of
thin one, and Parrington puts in evidence his use of allegory and
free choice whether or not a cultural historian shall be a literary
symbol and the very severity and precision of his art to prove that