PARRINGTON AND REALITY
27
saving salt of the American mind, the sense of the practical, work–
aday world, of the welter of ordinary, undistinguished things and
people, of the tangible, quirky, pigheaded, unrefined elements in
life. He knew, what so many literary historians do not know-and
his knowledge came into our thought about American literature to
freshen it-that ideas and feelings are sparks that fly when the
mind meets difficulties.
Yet he had, after all, only a limited sense of what constitutes
a "difficulty" and it is this which makes Parrington for many peo–
ple a not finally interesting thinker. For whenever he was con–
fronted with a work of art that was complex," personal and not
literal, that was not, as it were, a public document, Parrington
failed. Difficulties that were complicated by personality or ex–
pressed in the language of successful art did not seem quite real to
him or in the public domain and he was inclined .to treat them as
aberrations, which is one way of saying what everybody admits,
that the weakest part of Parrington's talent was his aesthetic judg–
ment. Mr. Hicks speaks of this weakness with relative severity,
atoning, I rather think, for his own past sins, and Mr. Smith says
that Parrington's "aesthetic errors of judgment were many." How–
ever, Mr. Smith adds, "but time is taking care of them. They are
being forgotten." But they are not being forgotten; Mr. Smith, for
one, has remembered them only too well; they form the very
ground of his book as they form the very ground of the literary
ideas of the great mass of quite serious people who, like Mr. Smith,
pin their hopes to "the broadest possible democracy." Mr. Smith
says too that no one will be harmed by the fantastic praise of
Cabell and that Parrington's virtues "reduce to trivia his aesthetic
errors of judgment." I am not so sure. Parrington's notorious
eulogy of Cabell is of course unimportant; the contempt with
which he treated Poe, Hawthorne and Henry James is very im–
portant. To dismiss it-or, worse, to follow it in effect if not in
detail-is to suggest that the "broadest possible democracy" is but
benevolent Philistinism, that it does not imply the greatest number
of kinds of people but rather the greatest number of people of one
kind thinking the same thing. I cannot help suspecting that Par–
rington's errors of aesthetic judgment, and Mr. Smith's after him,
are important not only to art but to politics.
