CRITICISM
27,
who,
by taking that position, are now making literary history. To speak
of an example with which I am more familiar than with many, the con–
l:ious political outlook of Nathaniel Hawthorne, though it was democratic
in a curious negative way, was consistent with his talcing a fatalistic and
indifferentist attitude toward the problems of hs time, including slavery,
and
with his writing a eulogistic campaign biography of the doughface,
Franklin Pierce, who was the political tool of the Southern plantation
oligarchs.
If
a gifted writer's mind were the simple unity it might he,
this would be the last word to be said about Hawthorne. But his work
a a whole is the scene of remarkable contradictions, and what is most
interesting in it is its slow, measured, intuitive, and one is tempted to say
unintentional criticism of the individualism that passed for gospel truth in
that generation and long afterward.
This is the third dimension in Hawthorne; and to come nearer to
our own time, there is some indiscriminateness in the repudiation of all
the reformist writers of
t~e
Roosevelt age on the simple unilateral basis
of their political naivete. David Graham Phillips and Winston Churchill,
for example, have been consigned to oblivion hastily and a little condescend–
ingly. They were "goo-goo" writers, it is said, and full of enthusiasm
for Beveridge and Roosevelt. One can understand this impatience, and
recognize that their political outlook is
one
oi
the considerations, though
only one, that make it impossible to speak. of them for a moment in the
same breath with Zola or Tolstoy. But in spite of this they were serious
American writers whose literary powers it is easier and more convenient
to
agree to forget than to define responsibly and sensitively; in the moral
transition during which the inherited standards of American individualism
lost
their authority, the honest, carefully documented, richly descriptive,
and sometimes affecting novels of Phillips and Churchill expressed some–
thing vital, something still full of meaning for us, as nothing else quite
expressed it.
This is and can be only a glance at a subject that in itself ·ramifies
like
an elm-tree, but at least some of the ramifications appear to be on
tbe
verge of the most intensive discussion. That discussion, it is perhaps
not too optimistic to hope, will bring us nearer to a clear understanding
of the ways in which literary history and criticism can be drastic, uncom–
promising, and (when they have direct political implications) clear-cut,
without being monosyllabic or absolutist; of the ways in which what is
still positive in bourgeois literature can be distinguished from what has
lost
all ts interest or repute; and of the ways in which the new literature
can be rescued both from a flaccid catholicity and a narrow political
utilitarianism.
