26
PARTISAN REVIEW
grave theological error but then it does have the advantage of being
the same practical proceaure which we use in
lif~r
at least in
the intellectual life, which seems to depend upon the fiction that
we and our compeers make up our minds and are responsible for
our good and bad ideas. Mr. Smith says that Parrington's method
of economic interpretation was rather inflexible as compared with
the "subtler materialism" of the Marxist method. I cannot help
thinking that this judgment does not come with entire good grace
from Mr. Smith, who, writing of Whitman, can say, "Therefore
the most interesting thing about his estimates of individuals is
what they reveal about his social and philosophic ideas. They
prove, beyond dispute, that he was a romantic pure and simple.
Where his reactions to the eminent romanticists differ in kind and
degree from those of other critics, they do not do so because of
any vital differences in principle, but because of temperamental
differences which were social in origin." This-and the reader will
supply his own italics-is being truly inflexible and of what is
suggested by such analysis Parrington had no touch. One gets no
sense in reading him, as one does get in reading Mr. Smith, that
Parrington felt that society was complicated enough without its
having human beings in'it. One knows that he could never use such
language as Professor Harry Hayden Clark used (Mr. Smith
quotes it and not for purposes of refutation) when he spoke of the
"modern fool-proof historical inquiry and explanation." Parring·
ton knew that the
mens aequa et clara
was one of the rarest of
things and he said of himself,"... Very likely in my search I have
found what I went forth to find, as others have discovered what
they were seeking." In other words, he was a sophisticated and in
many ways a sensitive man and he did not deceive himself in what
he was doing; he never spoke of himself as a scientist and when he
made his judgments he was aware that he was a historian and not
History.
Parrington was not a great mind; he was not a precise thinker,
nor, except when measured by the low eminences about him, an
impressive one. Separate Parrington from his admirable central
idea and what one has left is a simple, rather usual intelligence,
generous but not original; take him even
with
his idea and he is,
once his direction is established, rather too predictable to be con–
tinuously instructive. But he had what we like to think of as the
