SOURCE: "Tocqueville and American Literary Critics," in Liberty, Equality, Democracy, edited by Eduardo Nolla, New York University Press, 1992, pp. 143-52.

[In this essay, Strout discusses Tocqueville's comments and prophecies regarding American literature.]

Tocqueville's Democracy in America wavers between alarming prophecies about democracy in general and more sanguine comments about America in particular. What he sought in his book, as he confessed to his friend Kergorlay, was "less the complete picture of that foreign society than its contrasts and resemblances to our own."¹ There is on the one hand the possible coming, especially in Europe, of a "democratic despotism" marked by bureaucratic paternalism and the alienation of the citizen from political participation and potency. Modern American conditions have made that vision seem pertinent to many sociologists. There is on the other hand the America with some antibodies against the diseases of modernity because, in contrast to Europe, it has effectively integrated two traditionally distinct elements: "the spirit of Religion and the spirit of Liberty."² Many modern historians have reflected on that idea.

There is another Tocquevillean theme equally influential, but known mainly to American literary critics. His prophecies about democratic literature would have a remarkable career, beginning a century after he made them. This French influence was quite different from the recent proposals to treat all ideas about society, politics, and history as mere appearances that veil the ultimate reality of what Hayden White has called "figurative characterizations." French thinkers and their American devotees have made everything a matter of tropes, as if in keeping with Professor Higgins's dictum in My Fair Lady that "the French don't care what you do actually, so long as you pronounce it properly."³ These two French influences illustrate Marcel Proust's maxim that "every generation of critics does nothing but take the opposite of the truths accepted by their predecessors."⁴ The current fashion is to make us mistrust the coherence of texts, continuity in literature, or even the pertinence of any historical point of reference outside the maze of textual readings.⁵ Tocqueville, on the other hand, was called into service earlier because critics thought he helped us to see the contours of our national literary tradition, even though his terms actually referred to an ideal type of democracy.

Help was needed. After all, even a liberal novelist like H. G. Wells, as late as 1941, thought it was absurd for any scholar to call himself a professor of American literature.⁶ Our subject was still a poor country cousin in English departments until the Tocqueville-quoting critics put it on the intellectual map in a decisive way—with a crucial assist from the war, which made our writers attractive to European intellectuals, repelled by fascism. A Frenchman was, in this sense, our literary Godfather.

I first set out on literary studies very much under the influence of Tocqueville's literary prophecies. I was led to them by W. H. Auden's long poem New Year Letter. One of his notes strongly impressed me. "The American literary tradition," it ran, "Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, is much nearer to Dostoïevski than to Tolstoi. It is a literature of lonely people. Most American books might well start like Moby Dick, 'Call me Ishmael.' . . . Most American novels are parables, their settings even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia."⁷ This passage has a Tocquevillean ring. When I returned from the war in Europe to Williams College, I wrote an honors thesis in 1947 called "A Literature of Lonely People," and I cited Tocqueville on the danger that democratic poets, finding nothing ideal "in what is real and true" would "range at last to purely imaginary regions." (His prediction now seems more accurate about much "postmodern" fiction than about the canonical novelists I wrote about.⁸) Three years later a scholar observed that Tocqueville's contemporary prestige was linked particularly to his literary prophecies.⁹

Tocqueville's reflections on literature are generated by his method of using what Max Weber would call "ideal types." They refer not to an empirical America, but to a conceptual distinction between aristocracy and democracy. It is roughly identified for literary purposes with the distinction between classicism and romanticism. Tocqueville put it this way: "All that belongs to the existence of the human race taken as a whole, to its vicissitudes and its future, becomes an abundant mine of poetry." The lines that American critics would often cite assert that democratic poets will not feed on "persons and achievements," on "legends or the memorials of old traditions," or on supernatural beings, but rather on "passions and ideas," on "man himself, taken aloof from his country and his age and standing in the presence of Nature and God." The prosaic nature of democratic society will make the poet look beyond appearances in order to explore "the hidden depths in the immaterial nature of man" and so "to throw light on some of the obscurer recesses of the human heart."¹⁰

Contemporary American literature, he noted, was English in substance and form. It would some day, however, have a character "peculiarly its own," and he thought it possible "to trace this character beforehand."¹¹ He then launched into his familiar antithesis between democracy and aristocracy. His abstract distinction would be applied to our literature because our critics saw his polarity as a difference between American and English literature. A brilliant generalizer, he nevertheless conceded that "an abstract word is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in it what ideas you please and take them out again unobserved."¹² He admitted that he had done some conjuring himself with the idea of equality by personifying it; and he often forgot (as our literary critics did) his own warnings about distinguishing America in particular from democracy in general.

Tocqueville was compelled to speculate because his countrymen knew "much about Messrs. W. Irving and Cooper, a little about Dr. Channing. We have heard of some others," he added, "but without ever being able to judge them." He wrote an American collector of books to ask for extensive information about "the movement of ideas in the United States and the resultant literary development." He confessed: "It is a gap which I would like to fill, but I admit on this point I am almost as much at a loss as my readers."¹³ He never received an answer. Consequently, the only literary examples he cites in his great book on America are works by Byron, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine.

In 1941 when F. O. Matthiessen in his American Renaissance introduced Tocqueville's idea into the discussion of classic American writers, he applied it in a limited and persuasive way to Emerson and Whitman.¹⁴ But others soon extravagantly expanded the application of Tocqueville's idea. Lionel Trilling, when asked in 1951 to write on "the British idea in literature," was at first dismayed at the prospect of having to betray "that living multiplicity of manners and matters, of temperaments and wills, which makes the glory of English letters." He found a way to deal with it by considering the idea in comparison with American literature, which he saw in Tocquevillean terms as defined "by its tendency to transcend or circumvent the social fact and to concentrate upon the individual in relation to himself, to God, or to the cosmos." If the social fact did appear, it was seen as "alien and hostile to the true spiritual and moral life."¹⁵ This second point was Trilling's own.

His persuasive example was Kipling's socialized Kim, for whom the discovery of his ancestry is his destiny, in contrast to Mark Twain's Huck, for whom the discovery of his father's death brings only relief at his "greater safety in his isolate freedom." Only in the English book was initiation into society seen as "possible, fascinating, and desirable."¹⁶ D. H. Lawrence had seen "the end of the humanistic social personality" in our literature, and when it came to the "easily usable social tradition of literature" and the isolation of our great literary figures, it seemed to Trilling that Tocqueville "speaks more immediately than any American across the American decades."¹⁷ Four years later Auden, also citing Tocqueville, would use Oliver Twist and Huck to define a similar Anglo-American difference.¹⁸

This comparison was a critic's version of the familiar complaint by Hawthorne, Cooper, and James that American society as a literary subject was thin by comparison with English and European thickness. This contrast seemed to warrant identifying an American fictional tradition, different from the novel, called "the romance," a term Hawthorne himself had used to describe his stories. Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, agreed with the genteel literary historian Barrett Wendell that our early literature was a record of "the national inexperience" marked by "instinctive disregard of actual fact."¹⁹ For Rahv as for Trilling, the contrast between mythicizing romance and realistic novel was typified in the difference between Hawthorne and Henry James. Other critics, especially Trilling's colleague Richard Chase, developed the theme so that metaphysical symbolism and mythicized characters became the hallmarks of American nationality in literature. Chase found in the idea of the romance a way of praising "the peculiar narrow profundity" of American classics while accusing them at the same time of lacking "a sense of history" as well as "a sense of society and culture."²⁰ This charge reached its Anglophile apogee in Marius Bewley's argument that the American literary artist dieted on "democratic abstractions" that have "no social context."²¹

Trilling pointed out in 1958 that the decline of English power and the new sense of American destiny after the second world war had given us the ability to think of our literature as being "a separate entity, with its own special qualities which existed of and by themselves, with its own history peculiar to itself, with its own kind of development." It seemed to him that "all the world," and perhaps the English most of all, recognized this national difference. As if to prove his point, the Times Literary Supplement asserted for English readers that their fiction,

more than we ever realize until we set it against American, is rooted deeply in society; man for the English novelist is social man . . . and though the society may be criticized or rebelled against, it remains inescapable.²²

There is, however, only a half-truth in this vaunted Anglo-American difference, one that Anthony Trollope and Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in each other. The American preferred the Englishman's novels for being "solid and substantial" in the "realist" mode, while Trollope, an admirer of Hawthorne, asserted that American literary creations are "more given to the speculative,—less given to the realistic,—than are those of English literature. On our side of the water," he added, "we deal more with beef and ale, and less with dreams."²³ But the dreams often mixed the speculative with the social. While Trilling saw that our writers do not show social initiation in a positive light, a social theme in the work of Hawthorne, Cooper, Twain, and Melville does exist, often taking the form (as A. N. Kaul has argued) of a search for a more satisfying form of community life.²⁴

The thirty-year history of Tocqueville's literary prophecy has exposed its limitations by the evolving qualifications and modifications. R. W. B. Lewis's Tocquevillean idea of the American Adam as a figure "at home only in the presence of nature and God" saw him, nevertheless, as being "thrust by circumstances into an actual world and an actual age." This recognition of time, place, and history contrasted with Charles Feidelson's argument that American symbolism's "characteristic subject is its own equivocal method."²⁵ Daniel Hoffman in Form and Fable in American Fiction spoke of the romance as "an ahistorical depiction of the individual's discovery of his own identity in a world where his essential self is inviolate and independent of such involvements in history." The actual American, he claimed, had "neither a class nor a history to fix his place in society, neither priest nor church to ameliorate his relation to the immensities." Tocqueville, who made so much out of the influence and pervasiveness of American churches, would have been astonished at this hyperbolic development of his theme. Yet even Hoffman admitted at the back door what he had driven out the front, "the continuity of culture and the struggles of history." He conceded that the American fictional hero "must define himself in conflict with . . . a society reflecting the American inheritance of European culture and its burden of historical responsibility."²⁶ This inheritance has been the persistent burden of "the international theme" in our fiction of the bewildered American abroad, a story frequently told by Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Howells, and James, and even occasionally by Melville and Twain, not to mention the more modern examples of Hemingway, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Malamud.

Richard Poirier in A World Elsewhere expanded on Feidelson's idea of American classic novelists as proto-modernists by seeing them as creating through language "an essentially imaginative environment." His chief example, however, was an Englishman, D. H. Lawrence; and, as Warner Berthoff has pointed out, "'America' figures here as an almost completely unanalyzed historical integer." Nevertheless, Poirier had the good sense to challenge the romance/novel distinction on the solid ground that "none of the interesting American novelists can be placed on either side of this dichotomy."²⁷ By the end of the 1960's Joel Porte's The Romance in America took for granted the validity of the tradition I have been describing, but he improved it by adding race and history to the large concerns that the romancers used their fictions to explore.²⁸

In 1971 Trilling's colleague Quentin Anderson in The Imperial Self was still citing Tocqueville and Trilling, but Anderson was aware that American critics had been ignoring society and history in their intoxication with myth and symbol. He pointed out that our political founding fathers, after all, were not beguiled by abstractions and used a concrete vocabulary that "posited rooted oppositions between warring social interests."²⁹ Even more revisionary, however, was his turning upside down Trilling's often-cited contrast between Hawthorne, the abstract romancer, and James, the social novelist. For Anderson "the compelling character of history, generational order, places and things" was as absent in James as it was in Emerson and Whitman, while Hawthorne, on the other hand, in his profound awareness of "the constraints of associated life," was more akin to Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Anthony Trollope than he was to the late James.³⁰ Six years later Myra Jehlen also revised the "desocialized" theme by pointing out that classic isolated protagonists, such as Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, and Isabel Archer, illustrate an authorial moral: "all fail in the end to create their private worlds and their failure sounds dire warning of the dangers of isolation and solipsism."³¹ An English critic pointed out that while the protagonists of our classic fiction from Deerslayer to Invisible Man were not fully a part of their society, yet "to be outside society is not to be immune to its claims," as these characters discover, "shuttling to and fro" between "a desire for order and a desire for freedom, a responsibility to the self and a responsibility to society."³²

The 1980s marked a turn away from the Tocquevillean image of our literature because issues of race and gender had become politically salient.³³ The Tocqueville-quoting fashion tended to forget that symbolism could be "a method for exploring historical and cultural issues rather than for transcending them."³⁴ Melville's Benito Cereno is densely packed with symbolism, for example, but it is closely based on an account of an actual slave mutiny. The novella exposes the cultural and political significance of Northern racial and republican prejudices in the context of the crisis in the 1850s over the question of the expansion of slavery. Over a century later Melville's story would serve Robert Lowell in addressing a modern racial crisis through his rewritten version for the dramatic trilogy The Old Glory.³⁵ True, Hawthorne spoke of his "psychological romances" as a means of discovering "the truth of the human heart," yet they also notably exploited New England legends and memorable events, elements that Tocqueville identified with aristocratic literature, but which Hawthorne had closely studied and thoroughly made his own.³⁶

These steadily accumulating qualifications to the Tocquevillean theme correct its distortions without detracting from Tocqueville's genius. It is a mark of his historical subtlety that he acknowledged in a draft "the great difficulty in untangling what . . . is democratic, commercial, English, and puritan" in America.³⁷ This discrimination is more valuable than the "desocialized" theme because historically minded writers like Hawthorne and Cooper wrestled with the same problem in their work. Tocqueville, like our classic novelists, was also sensitive to issues of race and gender, topics which are now all the rage in contemporary criticism. A current critic indicts "prevailing perspectives on American literature" for minimizing social and historical contexts. They were no longer prevailing, however, when he published his book, but it is ironical that he should quote Tocqueville to show that there are always many "connections between the social and political condition of a people and the inspiration of its writers."³⁸ Quoting Tocqueville to undermine a "desocialized" tradition that was fond of quoting him is proof of his vitality. We have come full circle.

Notes

¹ Letter to Louis de Kergorlay, October 18, 1847, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Letters on Politics and Society, Roger Boesche ed., James Toupin and Roger Boesche trans. (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1985), 191. See Cushing Strout, "Tocqueville's Duality: Describing America and Thinking of Europe," American Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1969), 87-99.

² Tocqueville's formulation is the epigraph for a study of recent relations between politics and religion by Robert Booth Fowler in Unconventional Partners: Religion and Liberal Culture in the United States (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989). I made an extensive historical analysis of Tocqueville's ideas about American religion in The New Heavens and New Earth: Political Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

³ Hayden White, "The Historical Text as Literary Arti-fact," Clio, 3:3 (1974), 299; Cushing Strout, "The Fortunes of Telling," in The Veracious Imagination: Essays on American History, Literature, and Biography (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 13.

⁴ Marcel Proust, The Maxims of Marcel Proust, Justin O'Brien ed. and trans. (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1948), #354, 185.

⁵ Some French intellectuals in the 50th issue of Le débat (May-August 1988) have themselves made a trenchant critique of the reduction of reality to language, beginning with Structuralism. See the searching account by Thomas G. Pavel, "The Present Debate: News from France," Diacritics (Spring 1989), 17-32. For the orientation, influence, and confusions of deconstruction see John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

⁶ Fred Lewis Pattee, Penn State Yankee (State College: Pennsylvania State College Press, 1953), 165.

⁷ W. H. Auden, New Year Letter (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 153. This connection between Auden and Tocqueville also impressed Harry Levin. See his The Power of Blackness (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 17-18.

⁸ Commenting on the post-modern emphasis on life as fiction, Charles Caramello has noted how this literary fashion evades history. See Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self, and Postmodern American Fiction (Gainesville, Fla.: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 91.

⁹ Reino Virtanen, "Tocqueville on a Democratic Literature," The French Review, 23 (1950), 214-215. He notes that Tocqueville's prophecy applies to Emerson and Whitman better than to either Hawthorne or Henry James. Ibid., 218.

¹⁰ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. The Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen now further corrected and edited . . . by Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1945). 2 v., II, 75-76. André Jardin points out that Tocqueville's idea about democratic literature is similar to one in Lamartine's preface to Jocelyn. See Tocqueville: A Biography, Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway trans. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), 259. The important difference, however, is that Lamartine emphasizes that man knows that he is part of an "interdependent" unity.

¹¹ The George Lawrence translation of this passage in the 1966 edition of Democracy in America incorrectly has Tocqueville saying: "No one can guess that character beforehand." Democracy in America. Edited by J. P. Mayer. A new translation by George Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969)., 439. The French version [5th ed. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1848), III, 110], as Vincent Giroud, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has helpfully written me, is: "Il n'est pas impossible de tracer ce caractère à l'avance."

¹²DA [B], II, 56, 69-70.

¹³ James T. Schleifer, "Tocqueville and American Literature: A Newly Acquired Letter," Yale University Library Gazette, 54 (1980), 133.

¹⁴ Katherine Harrison earlier cited Whitman as proof of Tocqueville's prescience in "A French Forecast of American Literature," South Atlantic Quarterly, 25 (1926), 350-360.

¹⁵ Lionel Trilling, "An American View of English Literature," in Speaking of Literature and Society, Diana Trilling ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 261.

¹⁶Ibid., 262. Cf. also Irving Howe, "The Pleasures of Kim," in Quentin Anderson, Stephen Donadio, and Steven Marcus eds., Art, Politics, and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 157.

¹⁷ Trilling, ibid., 264; "Family Album," ibid, 238.

¹⁸ W. H. Auden and David Daiches, "The Anglo-American Difference: Two Views," Anchor Review, 1 (1955), 211-212, 219.

¹⁹ Philip Rahv, "The Cult of Experience in American Writing," in Rahv, Essays on Literature and Politics 1932-1972, Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 14. The essay was published originally in 1940. An anthology of American literature, first published in 1855, called The Scarlet Letter "a psychological romance" that even the "hardiest Mrs. Malaprop" would never call "a novel." Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1866), IV, 504.

²⁰ Richard Chase, "The Classic Literature: Art and Idea," in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Morton White eds., Paths of American Thought, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 54. Strangely enough, Chase himself criticized "myth-criticism" for not taking time and place seriously. See his The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1957), Appendix II, 245-246.

²¹ Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 15.

²² "Reflections on a Lost Cause: English Literature and American Education," ibid., 348; "The Limits of the Possible," The American Imagination: A Critical Survey of the Arts from the Times Literary Supplement (New York, 1960), 36.

²³ Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 235, 236. Nicolaus Mills, while he did not abandon the Tocquevillian themes, much narrowed the contrast between American "romancers" and English "novelists" by closely comparing several examples of their work. See American and English Fiction in the Nineteenth Century: An Antigenre Critique and Comparison (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1973), passim.

²⁴ A. N. Kaul, The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), ch. 2. James Gould Cozzons is the rarity of an American novelist who (in The Just and the Unjust and Guard of Honor) does see social initiation positively, but Trilling never discusses him.

²⁵ R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 89; Charles Feidelson, Symbolism in American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, 1966), 73.

²⁶ Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), x, xii, 7, 9. For "the international theme" in American fiction see Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

²⁷ Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 16; Warner Berthoff, "Ambitious Scheme," Commentary, 44 (October 1967), 111.

²⁸ Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), x.

²⁹ Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Knopf, 1971), 39.

³⁰Ibid., 77 , 223. Trilling himself changed his mind about Hawthorne, finding that for him the world was "ineluctably there." Trilling, "Hawthorne in Our Time," in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 199.

³¹ Myra Jehlen, "New World Epics: The Novel and the Middle-Class in America," Salmagundi, 36 (1977), 50. My undergraduate thesis made a compatible argument that our classic stories underscored the need to plunge into what first appears as "'the destructive element'—experience, society, affection." A Literature of Lonely People, 102.

³² C. W. E. Bigsby, The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 66, 145.

³³ For the polemical argument, addressed mainly to Trilling, that the theory of the romance has produced a canon of white, middle-class, male Anglo-Saxons, one that ignores Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow, see Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors," American Quarterly, 33 (1981), 123-139. Denis Donoghue cites Tocqueville's passage about the sources of poetry in democracy and also Trilling and Poirier on the literary sense that "value is not here and now but in 'a world elsewhere.'" His evidence, however, is the readiness of ordinary Americans to believe the worst of institutions and the professions—the result of a more recent "adversary culture" of suspicion. See his "The True Sentiments of America," in Leslie Berlowitz, Denis Donoghue, and Louis Menand eds., America in Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 236, 238.

³⁴ Cushing Strout, "Tocqueville and the Idea of an American Literature (1941-1971), New Literary History, 18 (1986), 123.

³⁵ See my discussion of Benito Cereno and The Old Glory in Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 111-114.

³⁶ The preface to The House of the Seven Gables is characteristic. See Cushing Strout, "From Trilling to Anderson: The Strange History of Tocqueville's Idea of a Democratic Poetry," American Quarterly, 24 (1972), 601-606. The best examination of Hawthorne's extraordinary historical sense is in Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

³⁷ Quoted from one of Tocqueville's notes by Sean Wilentz, "On Tocqueville and Jacksonian America," in Abraham S. Eisenstadt ed., Reconsidering Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 224. See DA [N], II, 5.

³⁸ Quoted in Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), 34. He cites the 1945 edition, but his quotation is actually from the George Lawrence translation (DA [M-L]).