PARRINGTON AND REALITY
25
write a slim book indeed-or an untruthful fat one. A book whose
judgments were made according to the critical standards that we
use for European letters would not properly represent a great part
of the literature of the American people, for to speak of the mass
of our past literature as a failure because only a relatively few
works or personal canons were still of lively classical interest would
be unfair to a literature that had, in its day, done its job. Parring–
ton therefore broadened the conception of letters and used for his
criterion not'present interest or charm, or technical or philosophic
success, but only the standard of historical relevance. He dealt
largely, of course, with political treatises, state papers, theological
works; in the field of what is usually called literature-what Par–
rington calls the belletristic, with the touch of disparagement that
goes with the word-he included the ephemeral, the local, the
technically bad, the deservedly forgotten; the standard was to be
not "goodness" or "badness" as the literary critic judges, but the
value of the work as an expression of significant conditions and
movements in American life.
In addition to this conception of letters--or, rather, preceding
and implying it-Parrington had another idea-that culture could
be given an economic interpretation.
If
only because this idea was
a cohesive and organizing one, if only, too, because. it excited so
much opposition in a field of thought where generalization was too
much lacking, Parrington's conception of economic determinism
was a useful one. But it was useful for an even better reason than
these: it could really interpret. While it could not, to be sure, tell
us all that we might want to know about either literature or eco–
nomics-for, despite our modem desire to think so, the translation
of one activity into the "terms of" another does not exhaust the
possibilities of interpretation-it could tell us much about the
important relation between the two.
Parrington's method had its clear limitations and often enough
he did not use it well. Sometimes he used it far too simply, some–
times he did not use it at all. One finds it hard entirely to blame
him for the lapses; one even suspects that the life of his book comes
in part from these very failures. Mr. Hicks points out that Par–
rington was not always consistent in his use of economic deter–
minism-that he was willing to apply it to his villains, the con–
servatives, but not to his heroes, the liberals. This is no doubt a
