derivation." And it is certainly true that an excessive reliance on presently adjudged masterpieces must give us a distorted picture of their times. Regarding the reduced attention paid to poets like bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier in successive histories of American literature, William Charvat wrote: "The shrinkage may be justified on critical but hardly on historical grounds, for the importance of these poets in their own century cannot decrease. We err, as historians, in allowing the taste of the modern reader to nullify the taste of the nineteenth-century reader." What permits the critical method to nullify that nineteenth-century taste, of course, is the assumption that this earlier judgement was historically conditioned, while its own is somehow timeless. If the weakness of the historical method was, in Howard Mumford Jones's words, its lack of a "point of view," the corresponding fault of the critical approach is a point of view so domineering that no fact of American history can withstand its powers of invention.
Like their counterparts in the historical camp, some proponents of the critical method have sought to solve the problem of American literary history by finessing it. Applying Trilling's principles to the canon of great American novels, Richard Chase taught a generation of Americanists how to choose their materials on critical grounds, line them up chronologically, assume that whatever recurs there in the way of theme or imagery or form or style is American, and then regard any variations in this recurring thing as evidence of its historical evolution. That Chase managed to beg both the question of Americanness, by locating it a priori in the texts studied, and the question of historical continuity, by neglecting to explain how the recurring literary feature was transmitted from text to text, did nothing whatsoever to discredit his model