PARRINGTON AND REALITY
37
conceive accurately of what we call society without also conceiving
of one of its attributes, culture.
If
we accumulate a great many
facts, a great many feelings which we examine carefully, if we are
content to admit that we must leave out some things, if we move
sensitively and know that we are working by analogy and metaphor,
we can indeed make certain formulations about society-and-culture
which give us the satisfying sense of comprehending, in an essen–
tial unity, a great diversity. We must of course be humble and
remember that pasts change, that, for example, there have been
many Greeces, and that we, like our ancestors, are making our own
past to suit the needs of our own present; but we must not be so
humble as to abrogate our right to make our own past. And if we
remember that these are our limitations we will be using some of
the virtues of science--or the virtues of what, as literary people,
we can have our own literary term for:
criticism.
True, this is not
science in anything like the full meaning of science; we cannot
predict with it, not in any sense which makes prediction worth
having; and only by analogy can we say we control with it. But it
has its own place and function, its own tests and virtues.
And one more point must be made about the conception of
science and literature when one thinks of Mr. Smith's method, and
that is the relation of our emotions to our data. The intrusion of our
emotions does not make science less scientific; an experiment or an
invention or even a formulation is an expression of our desires. But
at some point in the scientific process we check our emotions (and
certainly if we hold the special view of science that Mr. Smith
seems to hold we should not admit that our emotions come into play
at all) and it is therefore not a great support of his notion of scien–
tific criticism to find him scolding his facts, to find him indignant
because there are strong religous overtones in early American
criticism, or annoyed 'because the early taste was insufficiently
nationalistic and too much under the influence of England. And
what is even more devastating to Mr. Smith's view is to find him
quarrelling with literature for doing what it does do or has done,
rather than doing something else.
For example, Mr. Smith discusses three American critics,
Longfellow, Hillard and Bryant, who share the view that the pur–
pose of good literature is to take us away from the vexations of
ordinary life and soothe us, calm us, give us at least the illusion of
