Parrington, Mr. Smith and Reality
w.
Lionel Trilling
CAN SCARCELY
help thinking a good deal about V.
L.
Parrington these days. Not that he has ever been neglected-on the
contrary, in the years since his three famous volumes appeared they
have established themselves in our intellectual life not only by
their power but by their generous and spirited humanity. But this
year our awareness of Parrington must be especially lively. His
publishers have recently brought out a new edition of his work,
three volumes in one, far too heavy to read comfortably but, at the
lowered price, far easier to own, and this edition came appro–
priately when interest in American literature, stirred up by all
kinds of people but most significantly by the critics of the Left, had
reached a point almost too high. The Left, a large part of it com–
mitted to the militant Jeffersonian populism which was at the center
of Parrington's thought, could find comfort and inspiration in him,
and we have recently been given Marxist estimates of his history
by Granville Hicks and Bernard Smith. Last, we have Mr. Smith's
book,
Forces in American Criticism,*
which the publishers, the
reviewers and the nature of the book itself speak of as a work
begotten by
Main Currents in American Tlwught.
Parrington's achievement is known to everyone and there is
perhaps no need to write of it at length. Especially in its time and
place it was remarkable; in his own eighth chapter Mr. Smith
describes accurately, though with that Cato-the-Censor tone which
so marks and mars his whole book, the condition of American
literary history which prevailed up to the appearance of
Main
Currents:
it was not catholic enough in its scholarship, it was
largely conventional, but above all it was snobbish not only with
the usual genteel prejudices but with the special rigidity that can
overtake the literary caste of any social group. Parrington saw that
to write a history of the literary successes of America would be to
*Harcourt, Brace and Comp.nny. $3.
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