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  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

  Reality in America

  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

  ----------·------·-·-..._. _________ "

  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