Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
ideas and evoking a response. By means of a Socratic cross-examination
Parrington made the student discover his intellectual deficiencies;
while the class, to its astonishment and delight, found the quest for
truth both elusive and exciting. Surprise and satisfied expectation
kept the easily bored from sinking into apathy, for there was no
telling from day to day just what Professor Parrington was going to do.
He paired every occasion with a fitting response; yet this flexibility
did not degenerate into an aimless drifting, since he persistently
simplified his main objectives and concentrated the material to be
studied, while expressing its meaning through a significant symbol
or a telling phrase. His classes in the eighteenth century, for
example, were given the concept of harmony, balance, and proportion.
They found it in architecture, they saw it in dress, they heard it in
conversation, they watched it work out in the heroic couplet, they
pursued it in Addison, Pope, and Swift; in short, they analyzed the
whole social structure of the age and discovered it everywhere. A
germinal idea, Parrington liked to call it, while he held it before the
class like a many-faceted crystal, slowly turning it around and around
so the student could see every face. As a result no student who had
taken the course ever forgot the significance of this architectonic
trilogy.
In writing habits there was a similar all-encompassing purpose. He
habitually began with his thesis--a phrase, a sentence, or a revealing
figure. This was examined and stripped of its implications as one
would peel an onion layer by layer. So imperious was the habit of this
procedure that his ability to write would be blocked until he had in
mind a perfectly crystallized concept expressible at the maximum in one
sentence. An example of this occurred shortly before he left on his
trip to England. He had been working on the period that Mark Twain had
labeled the “Gilded Age,” but found the title inadequate to his idea,
and, as a result, his writing did not get on. Another day some weeks
later there was an obvious satisfaction expressed in his bearing and an
exceptionally pronounced twinkle in his eye. “I have found the phrase,”
he said; “I will call it The Great Barbecue.” Similarly, the three
volumes of this work began in a single paragraph which by progressive
unfoldings he expanded to its present scope.
After having made a provisional outline, with each section condensed
into a single sentence, he began writing, completing a unit here or
there as circumstance and mood directed. When it was completed the
process of readjustment began. Each portion was inspected for its
length, which had to be fitted to its relative importance; an emphasis
here was shifted to balance an emphasis there; the mood of one part
was altered to make it harmonize with the mood of its neighbor. As
many as twelve times he rewrote a single section in this complex and
delicate effort for harmonious adjustment. Finally, he made from this
his finished outline.
Knowing Professor Parrington’s methods one can now understand the
problem he faced and the solution he found when bent on the task of
writing a history of American literature. Although he was by nature
partial to the claims of aesthetics, yet it was obvious to him that
such an approach was foredoomed to failure. All too few of the American
writers would deserve treatment on any aesthetic test, while many
who were undeniably significant could not possibly be left out even
though inferior artistically. Moreover, one only had to look at the
numerous attempts already made to see the failure of the belletristic
interpretation. What were these histories of American literature?
Sprawling lists of names arranged in a fashion that gave little save
conventionalized data and some dubious evaluations. Already there was
a widespread demand for a new interpretation growing out of these past
failures.
Professor Parrington found the first step to a solution when he
remembered the day he opened Taine’s _Histoire de la littérature
anglaise_. It had come as a new and inspiring discovery to find a
method that envisaged the literature of a people as the inevitable
outgrowth of their racial peculiarities, environment, and epoch. It is
true that the claim set up by Paine, that his method was scientific
and could account for every phenomenon, proved to be unfounded;
but nevertheless his work was epoch-making; it gave a unity and a
significance never before attained, and this was what attracted
Parrington. Nothing less unifying than Paine’s method was thinkable.
A second source of inspiration came from a close friend and colleague,
J. Allen Smith, another pioneer figure, who applied to the abstract
theorizings of political science the economic realities that underlie
and determine them. The method was so fruitful of results that it
quickly spread to a group of American political scientists, from whose
findings much of Parrington’s significant work received its first
flattering confirmation. Under such a stimulus Parrington was quick to
realize the fruitfulness of economic determinism when applied even to
literature.
A third idea completed the synthesis. When he envisaged American
literature as American thought, the trammel of the belletristic was
broken and he was free to reëvaluate American writers, to follow the
trail of their work wherever it led; for at last he had found a method
true to facts, yet one which would satisfy his insatiable demand for
a significant unity, balanced, harmonious, and properly proportioned.
The economic forces imprint their mark upon political, social, and
religious institutions; literature expresses the result in its thought
content.
But a technique, though vitally necessary, is not the end of the
story. There still remains, even for the most impartial scholar, the
final and, be it admitted, inescapable evaluation. Parrington was
too honest with himself to dodge the issue; he made his choice and
abided the result. In the foreword to the first volume he made his
confession: “The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate
the materials is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather
than Federalistic; and very likely in my search I have found what I
went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking.
Unfortunately the _mens aequa et clara_ is the rarest of attributes,
and dead partisanships have a disconcerting way of coming to life
again in the pages of their historians. That the vigorous passions and
prejudices of the time I have dealt with may have found an echo in my
judgments is, perhaps, to be expected; whether they have distorted my
interpretation and vitiated my analysis is not for me to determine.”
Professor Parrington’s _Main Currents in American Thought_ has, then,
for its subject the adventures of American liberalism. To anyone alive
to the issue an adventurous story it is, as becomes more apparent
when the author’s own liberalism is completely understood. Those
sections where his sympathies are kindled, where he stamps his seal of
enthusiastic admiration, provide the clue which his treatment of Roger
Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau,
Channing, and Theodore Parker assuredly verifies. All of his latent
enthusiasms burst into bloom until, as in his essay on Roger Williams,
nothing less than the cadence and passion of the Song of Solomon would
express it. “Running through his writings is a recurrent echo of the
Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with glowing mysticism:
‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the
lilies.... I will arise now, and go about the city in the streets, and
in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.’ But when he
went into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of
Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The
lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the
high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it.
And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and
set his mind upon the new world where the lover might dwell with his
bride.”[477]
The liberalism of Parrington had this great virtue, which all too
many creeds lack: it was built on an obligation first to examine and
understand all points of view before exercising the right to condemn
them. Although he disliked the personalities and groaned at the dreary
pages of men like Cotton Mather, yet he was not satisfied until he got
at their marrow. And again there was an abiding sense of the humane
in Parrington before which all abstractions, generalizations, and
logical systems had to pass in review. He feared above all, as did the
sensitive Jefferson, the cancer of power. “Man,” he used to say, “has
never proved himself worthy of an unrestrained control of his fellows,
nor has any special group of men ever been dominant without injustice
to others.” Combined with this love of freedom was an urbanity and
a sense of personal integrity not subject to the interference of
outside forces in convention or mob--an integrity which so impressed
everyone having contact with the man, that he has been often called
an aristocrat. Parrington would not have objected to the label, nor
have seen it as contradictory to the principles of liberalism, since
in his opinion only liberalism expressing itself in a democratic
society provides for the free exercise of personal rights. Elevating
oneself by riding on the shoulders of others, a common device of the
pseudo-aristocrat, was to him but a vulgar gymnastic performance.
When he described Jefferson “with his aristocratic head set on a
plebeian frame”[478] he was unconsciously describing himself, for there
was a deep love of the soil in Parrington. One saw it, surprisingly, in
his hands. They were thick and sturdy, blunted at the ends as if from
too much delving into the black loam of his flower garden, where roses,
peonies, and crocuses were cherished companions, and the delight of his
leisure hours. He secretly suspected the apartment dweller as any true
farmer would; and though there was a twinkle in his eye when he called
New York a Babylon or spoke of its corrupting influence on scholar and
artist, yet there was a meaning implied more serious than the jest.
It was Parrington’s hope to vindicate this liberalism “stemming,” as
he said, “from the fruitful loins of the eighteenth century.” As he
diagnosed it, that era had two creative currents of thought: a hopeful,
vigorous liberalism, together with a sturdy realism which did not balk
at men’s selfishness or deny the economic basis of social forces.
Unfortunately the nineteenth-century liberal attended only to hopes
and neglected the realism, while the swelling forces of industrialism
accepted the economic realities but cynically brutalized them. Failure
was the inevitable result; the liberals despair while Babbitt, regnant,
infests the country with his blustering agents. In the unfinished
section of this last volume it was Parrington’s purpose to show this
parlous state of twentieth-century America, to discern the hopeful
gleam in the darkness, and to uncover the hidden forces working for a
more stable and just society. Parrington’s point of view then, was that
of a staunch and kindly liberalism, the motif in the three volumes,
the theme never absent from a page of the whole composition. It is a
liberalism not to be found in any program yet formulated by political
party or economic sect; it is rather a generous idealism that can
envisage a future richer in values, more humane in distribution of
favors than any known past. Wise to the ways of man, such a liberalism