116
PARTISAN REVIEW
grimly modern and
u~litari~?· .Attracte~ tov.;~rds
one
~~treme
or another,
literature emerged as either Highbrow or Lowbrow, but
s~ldom.
as. an
integrated expression of
A~~ri~n
life as a
wh~le.
No:w Yvor Wmters 1s like–
wise concerned with the hmitatlons of the national hterature; he, too,
has
a
formula for explaining them· and at first glance his formula looks like Mr.
Brooks'. Let us give it in his
~wn
words. "His
dile~a,:'-Winters
is
~peak
ing of Hawthorne-"the choice between
abstr~ctions
madequate or nrele–
vant to experience on the one hand, and.
ex~nence
.on the other
a~ ~ar
as
practicable unilluminated by understandmg, IS
t!ag~~lly
charactenstlc of
the history of this country; only a few scattered
mdi~Iduals,
at the cost. of
inordinate labor, and often impermanently, have
achi~ved th~ pe~meatl~n
of human experience by a consistent moral understandmg which results m
wisdom and great art."
Now Brooks' "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" were social categories; but
Winters' "experience" and "understanding" have a strictly ethical reference.
We are, he declares, a race of writers committed to the struggle for a
moral
philosophy
which shall reinforce and direct our inherited
moral sense.
And
because most of us have failed, our literature is on the whole structurally
formless and ethically obscure.
Winters' earlier book,
Primitivism and Decadence,
developed similar
ideas in connection with contemporary American poetry.
Maule's Curse
is a
study' of New England's intellectual traditions, and attempts to account his–
torically for the "dilemma" we have just described. Calvinism, says Winters,
was ultimately responsible for the creative difficulties of America.
It
im–
posed upon New England a schematic and dogmatic conception of human
nature, in/lace of "the patient study of the minutiae of moral behavior long
encourage by the Catholic tradition." But Calvinism was crude and con–
tradictory and broke down as American civilization matured. And presently
Americans were left with a high-developed conscience, a strong predisposi–
tion to view life allegorically-but with no authoritative moral system to
sustain these inherited tendencies. Consequently the writers of 19th century
America found themselves in a quandary.
If
a few of them (Emily Dickin–
son, Jones Very) inhabited "crumbling islands" of Puritan culture capable
of supporting the creative life, however meagerly, the great majority either
fell "victim" to "romanticism" (Poe, Emerson) or consumed themselves in
trying to understand a world to which they had lost the key (the later Haw–
thorne; Melville in
Pierre,
James and Cooper in part) .
Maule's Curse
is a serious book addressed to serious questions of Amer–
kan culture; but its author works in a rather intuitive and scattered way. His
transpare~t
style, his emphatic. self-confidence, imply a consistency of argu–
ment which does not really exist. We would have httle trouble,
I
think, in
showing that
Maule's Curse
embodies an extraordinary instance of the re–
ductive fallacy: it reduces the whole complex problem of American creation
to a problem simply of morality. Moreover, it divorces New England litera–
ture from American literature as a whole, and American literature from the
totality of Western culture. The results are in some cases exceedingly curious.
We are left with the impression, for example, that romanticism is an alien
product imported jointly by Emerson, who was a "fraud," and Poe who
was an "obscurantist," a verbal trickster, and a man without any
'~back
ground." Again, we are asked to accept as valid for America as a whole
certain generalizations which rest upon an analysis of but one region: New
