degrees of application. Having first determined, with Harry Clark, that all literature which falls "considerably below the esthetic par. . . belongs to the social historian rather than the literary historian," one may follow the advice of Henry Scidel Canby and study the best American literature "As art conditioned by the American environment." Or, instead of placing America and literature side by side, the critical historian may adopt a procedure recommended by Clark, setting the literature in front and viewing :the background . . . through the 'windows' of the foreground." Whereas both of these methods presuppose an independent knowledge of the historical background, Lionel Trilling considered America's literary classics an altogether sufficient source- indeed, the only reliable source- of information about American culture. With historical data safely out of the way, the road lies open to a view of American history as a "theme" that the critic discovers in a historically discontinuous series of texts selected entirely on the basis of literary merit. No longer the handmaiden of history, literature has here become its mistress.
The critical method, however, raises as many questions as does the historical approach it seeks to supplant. By what logic can the best American writings be considered the most American, when the criteria by which these texts are chosen have nothing necessarily to do with degrees of Americanness and when we know as well as Pattee did that, since the American literary norm (like the literary norm everywhere) is decidedly inferior, the best is by definition unrepresentative? How can we be sure, when literature is our sole source of knowledge, that it is American culture and not something less geographically specific that we are seeing when we look at our literary masterworks> "The weakness of literary history in general," Louis Wright complained, "and of American literary history in particular, has been a tendency to interpret presumed masterpieces in vacuo, or against an artificial background of the author's own