PARRINGTON AND REALITY
29
romantic
would appear in it rather often. So it does, more often
than one can count and seldom with the same meaning, seldom with
the sense that the word, though it is scandalously vague as it has
been used by the literary historians, is still full of complicated but
not wholly pointless ideas, that it involves many contrary but not
indefinable things, that it is not merely a suggestive word; much
too often Parrington uses the word
romantic
with the word
romance
close at hand-meaning
a
romance in the sense that
Graustark
or
Treasure Island
is a romance-as though it signified chiefly a gay
disregard of the limitations of everyday fact. Romance is refusing
to heed the counsels of experience (p. iii) ; it is ebullience (p. iv) ;
it is Utopianism (p. iv) ; it is individualism (p. vi); it is the extrav·
agant (p. 37); it is the self.deceiving (p. 49-"romantic faith ...
in
the beneficent processes of trade and industry:" as held, we ask,
by the romantic Adam Smith?) ; it is the love of the picturesque
(p. 49); it is the dream (p. 124); it is the sentimental (p. 192);
it is patriotism and then it is cheap (p. 235). It may be used to
denote what is not classical, but chiefly it means that which ignores
reality (p.
ix,
p. 136) ; it is not critical (p. 225, p. 235), though
at least once Parrington admits that criticism can sometimes spring
rom romanticism (p. 229).
Whenever a man with whose ideas he disagrees commands
rom Parrington a reluctant measure of his respect, the word
omantic
is likely to appear. He does not admire Henry Clay, yet
omething in Clay is not to be despised: his romanticism-though
lay's romanticism is made equivalent with his inability to "come
o grips with reality." Romanticism is thus the venial sin of
Main
urrents;
like carnal passion in the
Inferno
it evokes not blame but
ender sorrow. But it is also the great and saving virtue which
arrington recognizes. It was shared by the Transcendental re·
ormers he so much admires; it marks two of his most cherished
eroes, Jefferson and Emerson-"they were both romantics and
eir idealism was only a different expression of a common spirit."
arrington held, we might say, two different views of romanticism
hich indicate two different views of reality; sometimes he speaks
f reality in an honorific way, meaning then the ineluctable facts
f life with which the mind must cope; but sometimes he speaks
fit pejoratively and means the world of established social form;
d he speaks of realism in two ways, sometimes as the power of
