BOOKS

A Question of Standards

BY W. W.. ROBSON THESE two books* represent a new view of the history of the American novel, a view which is becoming more and more influential. Historians like V. L. Parrington, or Van Wyck Brooks in his later work, had demanded of the 'great' American novelist a straightforward treatment of American life and manners. They required `Americanism' in literature—a self-conscious emancipation from the colonial period. And they tended to regard this Americanism as entailing an equally conscious rejection of 'Europe.' There- fore both Hawthorne and Henry James were censured as escapists, and James, because of his supposed capitulation to 'Europe,' as disloyal besides. This view is now outmoded. The com- plexities of James's attitude towards America and Europe (or of Mark Twain's, for that matter) are more clearly realised; and it is agreed that the great things in American fiction are not best judged as more or less . adequate American equivalents to the European novel of manners. Nor are nineteenth-century American novelists now praised or blamed according to the degree to which they did or did not anticipate the realism of Dreiser or Frank Norris, of Sinclair Lewis or Dos Passos. Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination contains an attack on Parrington. In F. 0. Mat- thiessen's earlier American Renaissance the new view is seen in process of forming. Mr. Chase's and Mr. Levin's books show a further stage in its consolidation.

The essence of this new view is that the greatest and most characteristic works of American fiction are not 'novels' in the sense in which Vanity Fair or Framley Parsonage is a novel, but symbolic poems, parables, or fables, of which the best- known examples are The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick. If Wuthering Heights had been written by a New England Puritan, it would not have seemed the freak which it does in English fiction. What is the reason for the 'symbolic' character of the American classics? Much of Mr. Chase's book is devoted to seeking the answer. Both the subjects and the creative drive of 'classic American litera- ture' were supplied by the contradictions and divisions which the novelists sensed in American life, and which were due to the historical situation. There was, first, 'the solitary position man has been placed in in this country, a position very early enforced by the doctrines of Puritanism and later by frontier conditions and, as Tocqueville skil- fully pointed out, by the very institutions of democracy as these evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.' Tocqueville said that in a democracy 'each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object : himself. If he ever looks higher, he perceives only the immense form of society at large or the still more imposing aspect of mankind. . . . What lies be- tween is a void.' With this democratic starkness

* THE AMERICAN NOVEL AND ITS TRADITION. By Richard Chase. (Bell, 16s.) THE POWER OF BLACK- NESS. By Harry Levin. (Faber, 25s.)

Tocqueville associated the Calvinist habit of opposing the individual to God without (as Mr. Chase puts it) 'mythic or ecclesiastical mediation.' And Mr. Chase here emphasises 'the Manichaean quality of New England Puritanism, which . . . had so strong an effect on writers like Hawthorne and Melville and entered deeply into the national consciousness,' with its absolute oppositions of election and damnation, good and evil, the light and the dark. `If we may suppose ourselves correct in tracing to this origin the prevalence in Ameri- can literature of the symbols of light and dark, we may doubtless suppose also that this sensibility has been enhanced by the racial composition of our people and by the Civil War that was fought, if more in legend than in fact, over the Negro.' (This antithetical habit is the chief subject of Mr. Levin's book.) Finally, there was 'the dual allegiance of the American, who in his intellectual culture belongs both to the Old World and the New.' These oppositions and contradictions, then, tended to issue in fables, seemingly bOld and simple in outline, but concealing cryptic recesses of meaning. 'Meaning' in a special sense : for it is a peculiar characteristic of these fables that they do not always turn out to 'mean' what their authors might have said they `meant.' Never trust the artist, trust the tale' : it was in discussing American literature that D. H. Lawrence threw out this maxim. He certainly followed it to amazing lengths in his own interpretations of The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick.

Mr. Chase's book may be called an intelligent rehandling of the ideas of earlier critics : Law- rence in those original and provocative Studies; Yvor Winters in Maule's Curse; and Marius Bew- ley, one of the most brilliant of the younger American critics, in The Complex Fate. He acknowledges a debt to all three, but he always gives the impression of checking their findings for himself—his analyses, comments, and judg- ments are first-hand. Mr. Levin writes more elaborately and picturesquely than Mr. Chase, whose prose is rough-shod and repetitious;but he seems less engrossed by his subject. He has interesting things to tell us about the three authors he discusses, notably Poe and Melville—he is less good on Hawthorne. But his book suffers, and so does Mr. Chase's, from a serious weakness. At the risk of sounding ungrateful for two intel- ligently written and informative books, this weak- ness must be commented on.

The older views of American literature had many deficiencies with which the new View cannot be charged. But the new view is like older views in one damaging respect. It is grossly inflationary_ True, neither Mr. Chase nor Mr. Levin claims that W. D. Howells was a great novelist, as the older critics did. Nor- do they enlist, as presumable classics, all the names that swarm in Van Wyck Brooks's histories. But throughout both books there is a confusion, which is never properly cleared up, between the 'real' and the 'historic' estimates (to adopt Matthew Arnold's distinction). Where American literature is concerned, of course, drawing this distinction is sometimes a delicate business. Fenimore Cooper is a case in point. Mr. Marius Bewley has made high claims for the creator of Natty Bumppo as the first original and intrinsically important writer America has produced; he comes into Mr. Bew- ley's pages carrying impressive testimonials from Lawrence and Conrad. Clearly Mark Twain's famous attack on Cooper's ineptitudes is not the last word, and yet, when that attack is rebutted as Mr. Edmund Wilson rebuts it, we have the uneasy feeling that something is going wrong. Mr. Wilson speaks of Mark Twain's 'realism' and explains that 'The Deerslayer is not a picture of actual life, but a kind of romantic myth like the stories of Poe, Melville and Hawthorne.' But Mark Twain explicitly accused Cooper of violat- ing the rules of 'romantic fiction.' And it seems to me that his real objections have never been met.

Cooper requires so much extenuation, and of such a variety of kinds, that it is surely wise to abandon the claim for him as 'a great writer.'

Then there is the case of Poe. We note that Mr. Wilson, in the sentence quoted above, brackets him as a matter of course with Hawthorne and Melville, and he is treated along with them, as an equally significant figure, in Mr. Levin's book.

Toe's sky-aspiring divagations,' says Mr. Levin

in his fruitiest style, 'come home, with a ven- geance, to "the ultimate woe," the tragic fact of mortality.' Mr. Yvor Winters, in Maule's Curse, begins his chapter very differently : 'I am about to promulgate a heresy; namely, that E. A. Poe, although he, achieved, as his admirers have claimed, a remarkable agreement between his theory and practice, is exceptionally bad in both.'

I believe that in this case the heretical Mr. Winters is doing more than Mr. Levin to promote a real respect for the American classics. Poe's historical importance is indisputable—even if we decide that Baudelaire, Mallarm6, Valery and the rest received but what they gave. But to call him a great writer is to debase the critical currency. A still more alarming symptom of this inflationary tendency is the exaltation of Charles Brockden Brown, who may be characterised for English

readers as being mechanically morbid and un- pleasant in the way Poe is, without Poe's genius.

To both Messrs. Chase and Levin, however, he is a neglected classic (Mr. Levin calls him 'our first master of fiction') and a founder of the 'Gothic' tradition which culminates in William Faulkner—the unspeakable Faulkner of Sane.: tuary. It is easy to understand American critics enthusiasm for Brockden Brown : they have dis- covered a primitive. But the 'real' estimate in this case is surely not hard to find. English literature also is burdened with many inert 'classics,' but at least our students are not compelled to waste their time over Frankenstein or The Mysteries of Udolpho.

This cult of Brockden Brown may be a mere eccentricity. But the general -process of building

up American literature, even when it involves Hawthorne and Melville, arouses misgivings which are not dispelled. Mr. Levin brings our dis- satisfaction to a head when he reminds us of

Melville 'applying the touchstone of Shakespeare's tragedies to Hawthorne's tales.' That a compari-

son with Shakespeare's tragedies is sensible and

relevant, is itself a tribute to the New England writers. But that comparison does force us 10

admit their imaginative thinness. Henry James.

who is himself claimed for the 'symbolic' tradi- tion, noted it in Hawthorne. They are the least secure of great novelists. And they afford a shakY basis on which to rear such an. ambitious structure as this new historical orthodoxy.