SYMBOLISM AND THE NOVEL
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little worth and the round world itself but an empty cipher"-are
steps in the progressive secularization of the Calvinist interpretation
of the world, which in its tum is indebted to medieval typology
and exegesis of the Scriptures. The Calvinist is a realist who accepts
the facts of his world and does not try to alter them. He considers
it his task to interpret them in the light of Biblical precedents, and
to this end he contrives a structure of parallels between Biblical and
secular events. Thus he distinguishes himself from other realists by
his technique of interpretation, which is not secular and causal but
transcendental, which is based on faith, and which esta:blishes supra–
sensory points of reference for all things earthly. From this it is only
a step to the transcendent symbol, which also operates according
to the system of an inner parallelism between meaning and phenom–
enon, but which has freed itself both from rigid dependence on reality
and from the dogmatic bonds of the Calvinist faith. This emancipa–
tion was accomplished by the American Transcendentalists, abetted
by the European romanticists and romantic philosophers with their
faith in fairy tale and myth.
The religious basis of American symbolism was already noted
by F. O. Matthiessen in his
American Renaissance,
and observed
even more clearly by Yvor Winters. Winters recognized that the
Calvinist tradition gave its particular stamp to American literature
far into the nineteenth century. Winters's well known essay is an
attack on romanticism, and this includes symbolism, though he does
not specifically condemn it. Charles Feidelson, in his
Symbolism and
American Literature,
has an interesting essay in which he too demon–
strates the Calvinist ancestry of this American symbolism. He dis–
cusses the same authors as Winters, but his sympathies are decidedly
symbolist. His claims for the services rendered by symbolism are of
the broadest: "In the central work of Hawthorne, Whitman, Mel–
ville and Poe, symbolism is at once technique and theme. It is a
governing principle: not a stylistic device, but a point of view." This
is no longer literary criticism; as the tone of the passage shows, it is a
literary mmifesto. The particular
hybris
of the symbolist faith is
apparent in the assumption that the symbol is to determine the per–
spective of the work of art, the "point of view," as Feidelson puts it.
Yet Feidelson does see some of the problems inherent in symbolism:
arbitrariness of interpretation, anti-rationalism, and, as the final con-
