30
PARTISAN REVIEW
dealing intelligently with fact, sometimes as a cold and conservative
resistance to idealism.
But there is in
Main Currents
a deadly sin and that is turning
away from reality not in the excess of generous feeling, but in what
the author believes to be a deficiency of feeling, as in Hawthorne,
or out of what amounts to sinful pride, as with Henry James. Take
for example the following judgment and explanation of Hawthorne
which Parrington constructs with his confusing conception of real–
ity, with his still more confusing conception of realism, with his
vague notion of romanticism. There was, he tells us, too much
realism in Hawthorne to allow him to give his faith to the Tran–
scendental reformers: "he was too much of a realist to change
fashions in creeds," "he remained cold to the revolutionary criti–
cism that was eager to pull down the old temples to make room
for nobler." It is this cold realism, keeping Hawthorne from his
enthusiastic contemporaries, that alienates Parrington. "Eager
souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the
world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so
long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, Utopia is only the
shadow of a dream. And so while the Concord thinkers were pro–
claiming man to be the indubitable child of God, Hawthorne was
critically examining the question of evil as it appeared in the light
of his own experience. It was the central fascinating problem of
his intellectuallife, and in pursuit of a solution he probed curiously
into the hidden, furtive recesses of the soul." Parrington's lan–
guage, one must feel, is touched with disapproval of this enterprise.
Now we might pause Jo wonder whether Hawthorne's ques–
tioning of the naive and often eccentric faiths of the Transcendental
reformers was not, on the face of it, a public service, or, failing to
be a public service, whether it was not at least an interesting job
for an artist. But Mr. Smith would perhaps say, and Parrington
certainly implies, that as an artistic job it contributes nothing to
advance the "broadest possible democracy."
If
the broadest pos–
sible democracy depends wholly on a fighting faith I suppose they
are right. Still, society is after all something that exists at the
moment as well as in the future and if one man wants to probe
curiously into the hidden furtive recesses of the contemporary soul,
the broadest possible democracy, and especially one devoted to
reality and science, should allow him to do so without despising
