Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
arising, which deny the finality of economic law, turn in politics to
the ideal of a decentralized state, and in science to new syntheses
emphasizing the pragmatic and relative aspects of scientific law.
The latest literary fashions that Parrington intended to consider
embody a psychological emphasis seen in the impressionism of biography,
in the brutal but frank pacifism of war novels,[490] and most
significantly of all in the impressionism and expressionism of Sherwood
Anderson.[491] Parrington felt that there were rich potentialities
latent in these new methods although the writers of the new school
were themselves painfully at sea. In technique as well as in direct
statement there was to be seen, though obscurely, a renewed emphasis
upon individual integrity, the necessity for creative expression, and
the reaffirmation of what some may choose to call spiritual values.
In effect he believed that all is not lost. Through the influence of
science we are recovering the neglected realism of the past; we are
not only reaffirming it but making its acquaintance more intimately
than ever before. Weld that science to enlightened and humane
aspirations (Parrington believed that there was nothing in the findings
of science that prevented the union) and a revivified liberalism will
make the world a fit place to live in. It is by no means an easy
program, for it requires knowledge of fact, and ability to carry
knowledge into the sphere of effective action. It is made doubly
difficult by the untimely death of one of its chief proponents, yet in
the young men and women whom he liked to have around him there must
be, however obscurely, a feeling and a groping for the way out. They
will be guided and inspired by such utterance as Parrington’s diagnosis
of Sinclair Lewis, where he quarries out a vein of his own enduring
liberalism.
“Some lingering faith in our poor human nature he still clings to. In
the great American mass that human nature is certainly foolish and
unlovely enough. It is too often blown up with flatulence, corroded
with lust, on familiar terms with chicanery and lying; it openly
delights in hocus pocus and discovers its miracle-workers in Comstocks
and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But for all its pitiful flabbiness
human nature is not wholly bad, nor is man so helpless a creature of
circumstance as the cynics would have us believe. There are other and
greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped in America, worthier things
than hocus pocus; and in rare moments even Babbitt dimly perceives
that the feet of his idol are clay. There are Martin Arrowsmiths as
well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it will, can pull itself
out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes bad men. Put the banker
in the scullery instead of the drawing-room; exalt the test-tube and
deflate the cash register; rid society of the dictatorship of the
middle class; and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a
civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a
thing to be respected. For all his modernity and disillusion learned
from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair Lewis is still an echo of Jean
Jacques and the golden hopes of the Enlightenment--thin and far-off, no
doubt, but still an authentic echo.”
“Thin and far-off, no doubt,” is this contemporary liberalism, yet
Parrington found hints of it in the midst of the war fiasco that
culminated in reaction and despair. Death did not grant him the
opportunity to show what he found, but the young men who learned
from him the love of sound craftsmanship, who were inspired by his
enlightened dreams, will some day complete the monument. In the
meantime Vernon Louis Parrington would like to be held in memory as
he held his friend, J. Allen Smith--as a “scholar, teacher, democrat,
gentleman.”
E. H. Eby
_University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
March, 1930_
Footnotes
[477] Vol. I, p. 65.
[478] _Ibid._, p. 343.
[479] See Addenda for notes on these men.
[480] See Addenda for lecture notes on these writers.
[481] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[482] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[483] See Addenda for magazine article on Cabell.
[484] “A Chapter in American Liberalism,” which is included in the
Addenda, deals with this subject, with the muckraking movement, and
with post-war realism.
[485] See Addenda, “A Chapter in American Liberalism.”
[486] See “The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism,” in the
Addenda.
[487] See Addenda for notes on London.
[488] See Addenda, “Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_.”
[489] See Addenda for lecture notes on Dreiser.
[490] See Addenda for brief notes.
[491] See Addenda, “Sherwood Anderson: a Psychological Naturalist.”
Foreword
With the present volume I bring to a close my studies in the main
currents in American thought. The broad drifts of American opinion,
as I interpret that opinion, should now be sufficiently clear. The
volume immediately preceding the present one dealt with the romantic
revolution in America--one of the most stimulating experiences the
American mind has undergone--which was traced to twin forces: the
influence upon an expansive generation of French romantic thought, and
the spirit of robust individualism resulting from a fluid economics;
and the creative result was the spontaneous emergence in America of
a buoyant spirit of hopefulness that expressed itself in democratic
programs and faith in a benevolent progress. The present volume deals
with the slow decay of this romantic optimism in more thoughtful minds,
and the cause of that decay is traced to three sources: the stratifying
of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of a
mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which,
under the pressure of industrialism, the teachings of the physical
sciences, and the lessons of European intellectuals, is resulting in
the questioning of the ideal of democracy as it has been commonly held
hitherto, and the spread of a spirit of pessimism. The custodianship of
America by the middle class has brought unsuspected consequences in its
train.
Thus after three hundred years’ experience we have returned,
intellectually, to the point from which we set out, and the old
philosophy brought to the new world from the compact societies of
Europe, with its doctrine of determinism and its mood of pessimism,
has come back in changed form to color the thinking of our generation.
Emersonian optimism, that was the fullest expression of the romantic
faith, is giving way to Dreiserian pessimism, and the traditional
doctrine of progress is being subjected to analysis by a growing
skepticism. Our intellectual history thus conceived falls into three
broad phases: Calvinistic pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic
pessimism. Between the first and the last lies the America of yesterday
that shaped the American mind and American institutions; and with
the submergence of that native world we are in the way of repeating
here the familiar history of Europe, with its coercive regimentations
reproduced on a larger scale and in more mechanical fashion. Once more
a gloomy philosophy stands on the threshold of the American mind.
Whether it will enter and take possession of the household, no one can
predict as yet. This much nevertheless is clear: an industrialized
society is reshaping the psychology fashioned by an agrarian world; the
passion for liberty is lessening and the individual, in the presence
of creature comforts, is being dwarfed; the drift of centralization is
shaping its inevitable tyrannies to bind us with. Whether the quick
concern for human rights, that was the noble bequest of our fathers
who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried
over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to
leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to
which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope
that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the
intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt.
* * * * *
It ought not to be necessary to add that in these volumes I have
not essayed to write a history of American literature--that rather
difficult task for which no scholar is as yet equipped. But I have
suffered so many gentle reproofs for failing to do what I did not set
out to do, that it may be well to repeat what I said in the Foreword
to Volume I, that I have been concerned in the present study with the
total pattern of American thought--the broad drift of major ideas--and
not with vagrant currents or casual variations. In particular I
have been repeatedly taken to task for a seeming slight put upon
certain of our artists, and it has been inferred that I slighted
them because I chose to ignore whatever did not fit into a rigid
scheme of economic determinism. Let me say in rebuttal that I hold
no brief for a rigid scheme of economic determinism. I recognize the
rich culture potentialities that inhere in individual variation from
type, and I realize that the arts are likely to receive their noblest
gifts from men who should be classed biologically as cultural sports
or variations from the cultural type. But in such a study as I have
undertaken, individual variation is significant not for its own sake,
but rather for the help it may offer in determining the type. After
due consideration I see no cause to apologize for my treatment of Poe,
for example, if indeed I have done so. I am content to have placed
him historically and culturally in relation to the whole, leaving the
fascinating problem of his variation from type to those who deal with
such problems.
V. L. P.
Introduction[492]
In the second volume of my studies I laid down the thesis that at the
beginning of our national existence two rival philosophies contended
for supremacy in America: the humanitarian philosophy of the French
Enlightenment, based on the conception of human perfectibility and
postulating as its objective an equalitarian democracy in which
the political state should function as the servant to the common
well-being; and the English philosophy of _laissez faire_, based on
the assumed universality of the acquisitive instinct and postulating
a social order answering the needs of an abstract “economic man,”
in which the state should function in the interests of trade. And I
pointed out further, with adequate backing up, I hope, that the first
of these antagonistic philosophies was accepted by the agrarian leaders
of America and found issue in the Jeffersonian program; that the
second came to dominate the thinking of the mercantile, capitalistic
America and took form in Hamiltonian Federalism. Unfortunately this
logical alignment of diverse economic groups was obscured by the
needs of practical politics, and in passing through the explosive
Jacksonian revolution both philosophies underwent subtle changes.
Jacksonianism imposed upon America the ideal of democracy to which
all must thereafter do lip service, but it lost its realistic basis
in a Physiocratic economics and wandered in a fog of political
equalitarianism; and the Whiggery that issued from Federalism turned
to the work of converting the democratic state into the servant of
property interests. Both political parties contented themselves with an
egoistic individualism that took no account of social ends, forgetful
of the humanitarian spirit that underlay the earlier democratic
program. The finer spirit of the Enlightenment was lost, and in