32
PARTISAN REVIEW
Blithedale Romance,
dissent from the orthodoxies of dissent and
tell us so much about the nature of radicalism and moral zeal, is
dealing exactly with reality in exactly Parrington's sense, if Par–
rington had but known it.
Yet it is certainly not for the purpose of minimizing Parring–
ton's achievement that I emphasize what is, after all, so small a
part of his book and make an issue of what his admirers admit
only to forget. The fact is, however, that the issue is not merely an
artistic one; it is an issue in the very field in which Parrington has
his preeminence. Parrington, it is true, said that he had not set up
shop as a literary critic; but it is not exactly a matter of free choice
whether or no a cultural historian shall be a literary critic; no
matter what his protestations, Parrington had to exercise the criti–
cal function. To throw out Poe because he cannot be handled con–
veniently, to speak of him as a biological sport and quite apart
from the main currents is perhaps only a mistake or a mechanical
application of a method of economic determinism or an indication
of the limits of that method, but it also implies a most inattentive
reading of Poe and an insensitivity (which Mr. Smith also shows)
to the importance of style in the consideration of culture. To make
a great point that Cooper had a romantic (i.e. false) view of his
Indians, to speak of Henry James as an escapist, an artist similar
to Whistler, a man afraid of stress-this is not merely to be mis–
taken in artistic judgment; rather, .this is to examine without atten–
tion and in the light of a special snobbery the documents which are
in some ways the most suggestive testimony of what America was
and is: and of course to get no answer from them. We need not con–
sider whether or not it is in
th~
best tradition of the democratic
intellect to reject such testimony; we can leave out, too, all specula–
tion on whether artists of originality could ever make their way
in
a world of Parringtons. The more important question that must
arise is this: if the author of
Main Currents
rejects these works or
misinterprets them, is the picture of America he draws from the
works he does accept a picture that we can trust?
I put the question quite seriously. When we come to a disciple
of Parrington we shall have another question to ask; Mr. Smith
has, as he says, a political ideal in mind-the "broadest possible
democracy"-and we can ask whether, with his point of view and
Parrington's, it will really be the broadest, and the finest as well as
