Coeval with the Past

...When he held up socialism as an alternative to Emerson and Thoreau's individualism he seemed to be lecturing these ancestors quite as much as he was his contemporaries...

...Arvin was still able to see himself as a contemporary of Hawthorne's, for example, where-as Lionel Trilling has recently complained - later readers have made Hawthorne their contemporary...

...Sill" is a good example of Arvin's success in making the past "usable," as the critics of his generation put it...

...With this theory of what America could do to the sensitive artist, Arvin explored the lives and works of both major and minor authors in 19th century America...

...The Failure of E.R...

...How different, though, is the condition of the American artist or intellectual today...

...If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him...

...What they called the loneliness and isolation of the American intellectual, and found to be rooted in the past, we associate with the modern condition of alienation...

...Arvin took Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance quite seriously, and then rejected it...

...he was carrying on a dialogue with the past, the seriousness of which gave his final evaluations a rare balance and judiciousness...

...American literature was not just a specialty with Arvin...

...Who can miss the moral in the tragic upshot of tale after tale," he wrote of Hawthorne, " that, because the forces of decentralization have been allowed to dominate it, American life has failed on the whole to produce rich and complete personalities, men and women who touch life at many points and fulfill more than one or two of its possibilities.' This is the language and these are the concerns of Emerson, who declared in "The American Scholar": "Young men of the fairest promise who begin life upon our shores are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides...

...In his well-known essay, "Henry James and the Almighty Dollar," Arvin was trying to find in James what he had found in Whitman: Whitman, it could be argued, had a sense of class that balanced his "individualism," and James, in addition to being concerned with the individual sensibility, knew something about that great economic determinant, money...

...He was a reliable guide to these writers not so much because they were important to him in themselves, but because, being American, they were test cases for his Emersonian questions about the life of the mind in America...

...Arvin and the critics of his generation did not simply invent the map of American literature which we have inherited...

...Not an Example-Letters of Henry Adams.' The line of continuity from Emerson through Van Wyck Brooks which is present in Arvin's criticism explains the un-modern feel of it...

...Newton Arvin stands in the pantheon of critics of American culture with James, Emerson and Van Wyck Brooks...

...Sill was a minor poet who wrote during the interregnum between the 1860s of Emerson and Whitman, and the period of the modernists, Eliot, Pound, Frost and Stevens...

...The continuity with our past that Newton Arvin expressed in many of his essays may have been broken in our minds, but not, I think, in fact...

...Arvin then characteristically explains Sill's failure in cultural terms: "Sill was essentially a poet, but a poet who, in a stingy soil and under the wintry light of a low sun, never quite came to his full growth.' Arvin was perhaps at his best with minor writers-Sill, Thomas Holly Chivers, James Whitcomb Rileyabout whose limitations he was able to be candid without needing to debunk...

...He was well aware that this was the case with Emerson and Brooks, and sharply criticized The Ordeal of Mark Twain even though he admired it: "Brooks never shows how Mark Twain could have made himself the Rabelais that he never became,' he wrote...

...If Newton Arvin's reading of Hawthorne seems less close to the contemporary than it does to that of Henry James, it is not because Arvin did not know Kafka, but rather because he felt the same kinship with the isolated Hawthorne that Henry James felt when he was writing Hawthorne's biography...

...Reviewed by PETER SHAW Department of English New York State University at Stonybrook...

...Arvin was not primarily interested in mere theses...

...And when he argued that there was a strain of collectivist thought in Whitman, it was almost as if he was trying to change Emerson's mind by quoting Whitman to him...

...yet, more striking than this opposition between the two men is their identity of concern with the American cultural environment...

...Arvin's analysis of Sill's failure echoed not only Emerson's "American Scholar" but also The Ordeal of Mark Twain by Van Wyck Brooks...

...Though it is easy to see the influence of the radicalism of the '30s on Arvin's thinking, it would be too easy to accuse him of distorting Whitman and James to suit his own politics...

...Arvin thought that the answer lay in adopting a socialist perspective-Brooks criticized Mark Twain from the point of view of "idealistic individualism," but he should have raised "the question of the writer and his class.' While this, of course, is no answer either-we have learned that there is no necessary cultural salvation in the point of view of any classArvin's demand on Van Wyck Brooks is instructive...

...It was precisely because Arvin took their doctrines seriously and set out to correct them that he was able to carry on a kind of continuing dialogue with Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman...

...it was a necessity...

...Arvin summarized this book in a review: "Brook's argument [was] that Mark Twain was inhibited as an artist partly by the suspicious Calvinism of his early training and of his wife's culture, partly by the associated worship of success...

...For we have not yet answered the questions that Brooks and Arvin raised, we have only stopped asking them...

...Arvin finds some of Eliot's themes in Sill's poems, but he shows that he failed to give his self-doubt, loneliness and despair "the dignity of the victorious imagination...

...Like them, his value lies more in his critique than in his prescriptions...

...His purpose was always to find lessons applicable to his own time, as his titles reveal"The Relevance of Hawthorne," "The Usableness of Howells," "A Warning...

...It is Arvin's 1946 edition of Hawthorne's Tales, in fact, that Trilling mentions as the last collection old-fashioned enough to exclude "My Kinsman, Major Molineux,' a story now much favored for being Kafkaesque...

...contributor, "Critical Quarterly" Even though this posthumous collection of essays, reviews and introductions does not go back more than 30 years, it has an antique quality to it...

...Writing in the '30s on Hawthorne and Emerson, Arvin thought he had found an answer to the plight of the American intellectual in "centralism,' his genteel word for socialism...

...they were able to trace the outlines of the dominant theme of loneliness and despair in our 19th century literature because in it they recognized their own predicament...

...It was in that biography that James gave his indictment of the thinness, for the artist, of American culture...

...This bias explains what at first seems an odd approach in his essays: his practice of bringing to bear the triumphs of writers like Goethe, Wordsworth and Arnold for the purpose of elucidating the failures of writers like Edward Rowland Sill...

...He obviously read widely in European literatures, but his erudition was at the service of his study of America...

...Newton Arvin held credentials as both a modern scholar and a modern reinterpreter of 19th century books, but his essential concerns were very like those of the earlier American men of letters he studied...

...He was reversing Emerson, who had written, "What is the remedy...