28
PARTISAN REVIEW
II.
What cannot be missed-and what admirers of Parrington
insist on missing-is that Parrington's bad judgments of art are
not mere lapses of taste; despite such errors as his praise of Cabell,
Parrington's taste was by no means bad. His errors are errors of
assumption. Parrington was very much a man of the Eighteenth
Century; his ll.ffinity to the Enlightenment was not limited to his
admiration of Jefferson's political theory; it extended to the phil–
osophy which supported the politics. Indeed, one must carry him
further back than to Locke, to the psychology and aesthetic of
Hobbes. True enough, he does not often deal with philosophical
notions explicitly, but whenever he approaches a work of art we
can see what-in the technical, non-artistic sense of the word-his
aesthetic was. There existed, he believed, a thing called
reality;
he
believed that it was one and immutable, that it was irreducible,
that it was the starting point and referent of all our thought. Men's
minds might waver, but reality was always reliable. And the artist's
relation to reality was simple: Fig. 1, Reality; Fig. 2, the Artist;
Fig. la, the Work of Art. Sometimes the artist spoiled this ideal
relation by "turning away from" reality. This was an unscientific
thing to do and it resulted in certain fantastic works, unreal and
ultimately useless. That there was any other relation possible
between the artist and reality than this
give
of reality and this
reception
by the artist (who was rather like a good radio receiving
set) did not occur to Parrington.
Now, reality in this view of things, though it is always thor–
oughly reliable, is always rather sober-sided, even grim. Parring–
ton, a genial man, can understand how the generosity of man's
hopes and desires may leap beyond reality; to this excess of hope,
desire and energy, to this blindness to the limitations of reality,
he can be very tender. It is what he calls
romance
or
romanticism
and it appeals to something in his own nature. The notorious praise
of Cabell is Parrington's response not only to Cabell's elegance-–
for Parrington loved elegance--but also to Cabell's frank avowal
of the part which a beneficent self-deception may, and even should,
play in the disappointing fact-bound life of man.
The second volume of
Main Currents
is called
The Romantic
Revolution in America
and it is natural to expect that the word
