Carl F. Strauch
  TYPOLOGY AND THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

Ursula Brumm has written an informative and valuable book on the relation between religious typology and American thought from Samuel and Cotton Mather down to William Faulkner. * The German edition appeared in 1963, and in her “Note to the American Edition” Miss Brumm hopes that in spite of the passage of time and the accumulation of learned insights in the intervening years her book may remain “valid and can thus be regarded as a contribution to the problem of symbolism in American literature.” Her hope is a legitimate one, for though other specialists in Calvinism and our colonial period will qualify her insights, certainly the general student (and I now cast myself in that role) learns a great deal.

Miss Brumm’s all-embracing thesis is that in their use of typology the Puritans, against their better doctrinal convictions, gradually liberated comparisons between Old Testament types and New Testament antitypes by reaching out into secular history and nature until, almost unconsciously, typology passed over into symbolism. As Miss Brumm says, “It is not a new insight that Hawthorne, Melville, and their New England contemporaries are the intellectual heirs of the Puritans, albeit rebellious heirs.” When these nineteenth-century writers interpreted nature, spirit, and man symbolically they were, in effect, obeying an intellectual habit that had been established long before their time. It is the special distinction of Miss Brumm’s book that this symbolizing mode is convincingly derived from religious typology, which earlier historians of our nineteenth-century literary development were entirely unaware of or slighted.

Far from employing allegory or symbol, typology links definite biblical persons or events in “a reciprocal relation of anticipation and fulfillment.” The Old Testament is prophetic of the New. Indeed, as Miss Brumm points out, the federal theology of the New England Puritans is essentially typological, the covenant of works with Adam providing the anticipation of the covenant of grace as the fulfillment in Christ.

We need not delay over Miss Brumm’s establishing her position on the subject, economically and adequately, as she deals with the word Typus and its definitions in Grimm Wrterbuch, the OED, and the like. She informs us of the prophetic characteristic of typology, as groundwork for the subsequent expansion and sophistication of the idea. Thus Adam and Jonah, among other Old Testament characters, are types of Christ, and the raised brazen serpent is a type of Christ’s crucifixion.

The line of development was from St. Paul to Dante (in this Miss Brumm depends on Auerbach) and thence to Luther and Calvin. When Miss Brumm picks up the narrative she starts with Richard Mather’s son Samuel, who was in turn the uncle of Cotton Mather. “Characteristically enough,” she remarks, “it was Mather’s Puritan enmity towards symbols that led him to typology.” Cotton Mather enlarged the notion of typology by including models from secular history in “a closely spun but arbitrary system of parallels and analogies, in which ancient history is used to illustrate the Scriptures, and vice versa, and in which both prefigure and illuminate the history of the Puritans.” Cotton Mather expressed the view of New England Puritans that in fleeing Egypt, wandering in the wilderness, and settling in the Promised Land, the children of Israel provided a model for themselves, and New England was a New Canaan or a Second Jerusalem. Cotton Mather saw world history in this light as a “fulfillment of prophecies and the repetition of exemplary models rather than as the development toward something entirely new.” Miss Brumm’s treatment of Samuel and Cotton Mather is scant enough but sufficient to demonstrate that with his secular instances Cotton marks an advance on Samuel, though we are still interpretively factual enough and remote from symbolical insight.

The next step, and a large one, lies in Edward Taylor’s adaptation of typology to symbolism, for, contradictorily, Puritan dogma and Bible interpretation led Taylor to the threshold of a symbolic view of the world that, as Miss Brumm states, he did not intend and that ran counter to his convictions. In the fervid imagination of a Puritan poet, who could not take the mystical way of Catholic tradition, all phenomena became symbolical expressions of the divine; and this was sanctioned by the parallels between the “signs or signals” of natural phenomena and “the manifestations and events of the Bible.”

Miss Brumm concentrates on the Second Series (1693-October 1725) of the Preparatory Meditations and makes three groupings: (1) Meditations 1-61 (1693-1704), dominated by the typological interpretation of the Bible; (2) Meditations 62-114 (1704-13), dealing with various scriptural passages especially from St. Paul and St. John and touching upon the Lord’s Supper and transubstantiation; (3) Meditations 115-65 (1713-25), concerned, except for four poems, with the Song of Solomon. In this final group the Bible has become entirely symbolic, and under Miss Brumm’s guidance, we behold across a span of more than thirty years the unfolding of a truly poetic gift.

It would be tedious to repeat in small scope what Miss Brumm has demonstrated in her Chapter Five of some thirty compact pages, but a few comments will not be amiss. There can be no doubt that Miss Brumm has opened up a rich vein, and she is circumspect at the start of her chapter when she says that her aim “is to study the Meditations more from the standpoint of theology and to inquire into their significance for intellectual history.” Thus in Meditation I Taylor says:

The glory of the world slickt up in types
In all Choise things chosen to typify,

and he continues

The glory of all Types doth meet in thee,

and Miss Brumm’s comment is that already “the notion of the type is here extended from the Old Testament to the world: all the glorious things of the world are types pointing to Christ.” So, in dealing with nonpersonal types, Taylor crosses easily over the border between fixed relations between type and antitype and a unifying symbolism, as when he says in Meditation 20, “Thou art my Tabernacle.” Miss Brumm admirably demonstrates Taylor’s increasingly symbolical interpretation of Bible passages, especially those in the final fifty Meditations, in which Taylor handles the frank sensuality of the Canticles. No one could put the dramatic growth toward this position better than she herself does: “In the ‘Meditations, Second Series’ one can see exactly how his fantasy develops more and more toward allegory. From historically fixed types he turns to a typological, metaphorical interpretation of the Lord’s Supper (Christ’s flesh = manna or ‘spiritual Bread’), and from there he advances to a purely metaphorical allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon, where all the images are ‘spiritualized.’” That Taylor exceeded the limits set by Puritan theology in his succumbing to “the charm of biblicoOriental word pictures” is an inherently paradoxical result of his reli gion, which “had trained his imagination to discover connections between the terrestrial and divine worlds,” and he did so with great exuberance of imagination. He was a poet.

So far, in an admirable chapter, Miss Brumm takes us, and the general student of our American literature who, like myself, has been inspired by her to read a considerable sampling of the interpretation of Taylor beginning with Austin Warren ( 1941 ) and concluding with Kathleen Blake ( 1971 ) realizes that on her own ground she remains a knowledgeable interpreter of her poet.

I believe that Sacvan Bercovitch was the first to comment in print on Miss Brumm’s book. In an important footnote to his article, “Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams-Cotton Controversy Reassessed” ( AQ, 29, Summer, 1967 , 166-91; fn, p. 171) he made two penetrating observations on the original German edition, Die Religise Typologie im Amerikanischen Denken. Professor Bercovitch’s first remark was that Miss Brumm, “following Miller . . . begins her discussion only with the end of the seventeenth century, and so fails to present Taylor in his immediate European and American context.” Bercovitch’s argument is that, far from repudiating typology the early Puritans used it copiously. Thus in the quarrel between John Cotton and Roger Williams the difference was not between hostility to typology, on the one hand, and acceptance of it, on the other, but between two schools of typological interpretation; “the controversy . . . between Williams, the heretic, and John Cotton, the spokesman for the orthodoxy, took place within a culture thoroughly familiar with typology.” The difference was that Cotton proclaimed a “literal-spiritual continuity between the two Testaments and the colonial venture in America,” whereas Williams took an allegorical view of typology. Both Origen and Augustine interpreted typology as “figural prophecy,” which is “purely spiritual.” Like Augustine, says Bercovitch, Williams was greatly disappointed by the state, but Cotton was not. I take it from Bercovitch’s remarks that Miss Brumm’s book is defective in its omission of the typology of the first generation of New England Puritans.

Professor Bercovitch’s second comment suggests the expansion of the treatment of Taylor’s use of typology, which may be conveniently studied in the light of George Herbert’s use of types. “Virtually all of the figures” that Rosemund Tuve notes in her A Reading of George Herbert “appear, many recurrently, in Taylor’s poems.” Only once, and briefly in a note, does Miss Brumm refer to Professor Martz’ observations on Herbert in his introduction to Stanford’s edition of Taylor’s poems. Bercovitch gives three examples of typological figures: thorns-vine-grapes, garden-cabinet-jewels-music, and bloodArk-Jordan. Miss Tuve’s book is full of references to the typological tradition in religious and poetic practice. In the late Middle Ages the iconographical presentation of typological series is impressively abundant. The representation of Christ, for example, as the miraculous grape-bunch, figuring forth the inheritance of the Chosen People, crossing over Jordan into the Promised Land, is one of the oldest of the Old Testament types, with a history in glass, illumination, woodcarving, enamels, painting, and book-illustration, enduring until well after Herbert’s day. There is no escaping the fullness and elegance of Miss Tuve’s demonstration that behind Herbert’s imagery lies a typological tradition that enriched the Christian understanding in a most aesthetic as well as religious and doctrinal way.

After these important exceptions to Miss Brumm’s work one needs to return to her statement on Taylor, that her aim “is to study the Meditations more from the standpoint of theology and to inquire into their significance for intellectual history.” However one may regard her omission of the treatment of typology before the latter seventeenth century, one must acknowledge that for her discussion of Taylor Miss Brumm imposed rather severe limits. Certainly a study of the aesthetic enrichment of typological structures in Taylor’s verse is a necessary rounding out of the theological and intellectual. In her article, “The ‘Tree of Life’ in Edward Taylor’s Meditations” ( EAL, 3, Fall, 1968 , 72-87), the German original of which appeared in 1967, Ursula Brumm makes good this omission. I judge the article to be as important as the chapter, for in discussing the image of the Tree of Life in Taylor’s verse she approaches more intimately Taylor’s problems and intentions than she had before. “In order to give a poetic expression to the intellectual core of his faith with its complex abstract concepts of ‘grace,’ ‘regeneration,’ ‘eternal life,’ which at the same time he expanded in lengthy and difficult sermons, Taylor availed himself of biblical images and used them with the typological embellishments already provided by Church Fathers and other commentators.” The tree of life, the olive tree, the palm tree, the apple tree, the grapevine, the ark, and the root of Jesse are all of them Old Testament types that “demand an interpretation . . . directed at Christ and through him they are linked with the related images and events of the New Testament, particularly the vine, the grapes, the olive tree.” Throughout her article Miss Brumm shows “how on the one hand biblical origin and theological elaboration of these images and, on the other, their natural characteristics and attributes--such as species, appearance or the organs: root, trunk, branches, fruits--are employed, related or singled out in [ Taylor’s] poetical usage. Only if both dimen sions of such a poetical component--the theological and the naturalare investigated, can anything be said about Taylor the poet and his method of composition.”

Miss Brumm concludes her article by asking what kind of poetry Taylor intended to write. His meditations are “serious and engaged” theology expressed in poetic form, and they were intended to differ from the sermons, although, she adds, “never poetry in the secular sense.” Taylor brought the imaginative use of typology to bear upon and enhance theological doctrine. In all he wrote Taylor belongs not only to a theological tradition but to a tradition of the visual arts. During the Middle Ages, Miss Brumm reminds us, “Christ’s family tree was represented in innumerable pictures, book illustrations, embroideries, glass windows, on church doors, or carved in stone,” as well as in poetry and drama.

In his Edward Taylor ( 1961 ) Norman Grabo, though he saw that there was a relation between emblem books and typology, was not led by his discussion of the emblem tradition to a like consideration of typology in Taylor’s verse. Eight years later Thomas E. Johnston, in his “Edward Taylor: An American Emblematist” ( EAL, 3, Winter, 1968-69 , 186-98) failed in the same way. It remained for Miss Brumm to produce a pioneering study from her special point of view, and her great merit is that she has provided a basis in real knowledge for the further and increasingly fruitful study of Taylor. Just last year, again in EAL, Thomas M. Davis published an important article, “Edward Taylor and the Traditions of Puritan Typology,” that owes something to Miss Brumm, but he adds a particular insight that is worth quoting: “In these early Meditations, Taylor carefully excludes from the central or ‘doctrinal’ portion of the poem, any personal involvement. Meditation 9, for example, is representative of this approach. Yet, increasingly in later Meditations, Taylor directly and explicitly involves himself in the typical meaning of the poem; types cease to be historical phenomena and become reflections of his own spiritual state.”

To return to her book, Miss Brumm suggests that Taylor went from historically fixed types to a typological, metaphorical interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, and his imagination burst the confines of Puritan sobriety as he succumbed to the charms of the Song of Solomon. Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, applied typology to the future and gave us “the early theological version of that nineteenthcentury American view of history which looked rather to the future than to the past,” dismissing Europe as corrupt and bloody and ex. tolling America as entirely peace-loving, innocent, and therefore happy. Miss Brumm presents Edwards and Emerson in diptych, following the device in Miller’s famous essay; and if we hold all three writers, Taylor, Edwards, and Emerson, up to speculative appraisal, our judgment of their differences and likenesses should go far toward explaining the unfolding of thought in a highly intellectual community across a span of more than a century.

It is salutary both in Miller and Brumm to be reminded of Emerson’s indebtedness to a Calvinistic past, though in my opinion that influence is more diffused than specific. I suspect that Miss Brumm overworks the typological influence and evidence in Emerson in her assumption that behind every usage of the word “type” there lies the traditional thought she so capably demonstrates in others. To be sure, she is correct in taking Emerson’s view of the Lord’s Supper as a continuation of the New England concern with this sacrament. She is entirely right in seeing typology in Emerson’s sermon on the Lord’s Supper in such a remark as this: “nothing could be more natural than . . . that they, Jews like Jesus, should adopt his expressions and his types.” But it is highly questionable that Emerson’s remark in his chapter “Language” in Nature is typologically inspired: “Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.” In his use of the word “type” Emerson owes far more to his modern dictionary and modern science in his day than to the inherited tradition of typology. Yet Miss Brumm’s final remark is irreproachable: “The same nature which the first Puritans found inimical and savage received by virtue of Emerson’s heresy the consecration which made it the ground of symbols and knowledge, and thus a vital element in American literature.”

It is with Hawthorne and Melville that Miss Brumm is more rewarding in tracing the presence of typology in the American Romantics. Most of her remarks about these two writers are routine and commonplace enough--except for the typological exposition, and that makes all the difference, for, to use an expression of Emerson, typology is her “angle of vision.”

Miss Brumm is astute in her distinctions in Hawthorne’s use of emblem,” “symbol,” and “type,” three concepts that, she says, occur “with almost the same frequency.” Her demonstration of such a distinction in “The Minister’s Black Veil” between “type” and “symbol,” when Father Hooper says, “Know then, this veil is a type and a symbol,” is entirely credible. Miss Brumm states that Hawthorne’s use of “type.” “represents a stage of its transition from the original theological meaning to the generalized symbolic function in the figurative . . . representation of a quality.” Her chief demonstration of this transition is with The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun.

The structure of The House is typological. The opening story of Colonel Pyncheon’s greed is “a prefiguration--or ‘type,’ if you please--of the history of the entire Pyncheon family.” Just as later characters have parallels to historical characters, so there is “a principle of parallels and correspondences in regard to . . . the scenes and physical objects,” the house, Maule’s well, and the like. Miss Brumm has much to say about “romance” elements, the effects that, as Jane Lundblad has demonstrated, came to Hawthorne from Gothic romance. In The House they are “a disguise for the original theological notions of predestination and cyclical recurrence, which are anchored by Hawthorne more in a moral principle than in divine omnipotence.”

The typological element Miss Brumm seizes upon in The Scarlet Letter occurs in chapter XII, “The Minister’s Vigil"--the appearance of the great red letter A in the heavens. She suggests that the prophetic purport of this divine sign is blunted when Hawthorne explains for the modern reader that it could have been a natural phenomenon or the delusion of a mind burdened with guilt. Miss Brumm goes on to say that Hawthorne wavered between two explanations and that this “device of multiple choice,” as Matthiessen called it, is too superficial a formula to stand as evidence of Hawthorne’s profundity. If Matthiessen thought this device “one of his most fertile resources” one must, I think, agree with Miss Brumm that, truly, it scarcely goes beyond the obvious.

In The Marble Faun Donatello is a romanticized descendant from the realm of theology. In the universal human guilt after the Fall the gap between the ancient heathen world and the modern age is bridged in Donatello, who is the type of a faun of classical antiquity and thus the innocent Adam of the Christian tradition. The typological also carries over into the relation between Miriam and a painting of Beatrice by Guido Reno and also that between the sinister model and another painting by the same artist.

There is tragedy in Hawthorne’s career as Miss Brumm sees it, for though typology suited him it was intellectually obsolescent in the nineteenth century, and, as she says, Hawthorne"never really belonged to his own era intellectually."” Hawthorne never wholly succeeded in uniting the two main constituents of his mind, the Puritan and the nineteenth-century ones”; if there is a contradiction in these two statements it is, I think, only through inadvertence, and, on the whole, we gather Miss Brumm’s intention.

What is one to make of Miss Brumm’s typological demonstration? I must confess to some disappointment because in seeing Hawthorne from a typological angle of vision she turns up only the accepted commonplace of interpretation. Miss Brumm applies a new name, typology, to a sense of fate and predestination already long and firmly established in Hawthorne criticism. In fairness to her, I add that this name and this angle of vision quicken our awareness of ancestral habits of thought lodged in the strata of Hawthorne’s mind; the sense of fate and predestination is thus given psychic depth, rendered in greater perspective.

If so, we must deplore Miss Brumm’s limited exploration of the typological habit of Hawthorne’s mind. One respects her statement that “it is not the purpose of this study to examine the total significance of Hawthorne’s entire work.” By all means; that would be a large order, larger than any Hawthorne specialist has undertaken. But perhaps we may accept the hint Miss Brumm has offered on Hawthorne’s typological habit of mind and extend that insight to embrace the psychological.

For Edward Taylor typology provided the theological focus for intense emotional experiences, and the fictional Arthur Dimmesdale, a Puritan minister of an earlier era, had like but even more eruptive crises because their source was a sense of personal guilt. In her all too brief discussion of typology in “The Minister’s Vigil” the attention Miss Brumm gives to “the device of multiple choice” is distracting. The profound suffering, arising out of his burden of guilt, is inextricably involved with the appearance of the letter in the heavens. Properly one should not be satisfied with only half of the scene; the total significance of the chapter must be explored.

An even profounder engagement of typology and psychology is offered in chapter XX, “The Minister in a Maze.” Here, returning home from the forest meeting with Hester, Dimmesdale encountered three great temptations, which he barely conquered. The first was with one of his deacons, to whom he was tempted to say something blasphemous about the Lord’s Supper. The second was with the eldest female member of his church, to whom, under the sway of “the great enemy of souls,” he was tempted to suggest an “unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul.” The third was with “a maiden newly won” to God and Christ, and that by a sermon preached by Dimmesdale himself; lest he “blight all the . . . innocence with but one wicked look,” he held his Geneva cloak before his face and passed by.

Christians are taught that because of his human and divine nature (theanthropy) Christ, in his great threefold temptation by Satan, intimately felt our human weakness, though he prevailed over “the great enemy of souls.” Thus Christ’s temptation is the archetypal encounter with Satan and provides the model for Dimmesdale’s experience. The House of the Seven Gables is very low-keyed,--characters, themes, typology; but The Scarlet Letter is a vehement book in which the typological is swept up irresistibly into the orbit of psychological suffering, is indeed the emblematic seal of that. Note in the chapter we are dealing with, this amazing piece of psychology just before the temptations: “Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.” Here, though without the awesome rhetoric of the gigantesque in Moby-Dick, we have a dreadful paradox of psychology comparable to that in the immense chapter 44, “The Chart,” delineating Ahab’s schizophrenia.

There are other instances of the fusion of typology and psychology in The Scarlet Letter. In chapter XI, “The Interior of a Heart,” Dimmesdale’s “inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with the old corrupted faith of Rome, than with the better light of the church in which he had been born and bred.” In scourging himself Dimmesdale fled psychologically into the past and sought his type in the flagellating monk. Hester, on the contrary, anticipated the future in like typological fashion. In chapter XIII, “Another View of Hester,” in a brief passage that has remained astonishing for me, Hester is made part of the political and intellectual revolution of the age in Europe: “The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. . . . Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic. . . . In her lonesome cottage, by the seashore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.” Thus Hester became, in Hawthorne’s treatment, a type of the woman of the future, though she considered herself to be unworthy of the role of prophetess for her own day. In chapter XXIV, “The Conclusion,” the typological receives full scope of Futurity in the remark that when she counselled women in trouble, Hester “assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.”

It is for the rather large reason laid forth in the preceding four paragraphs that I cannot accept Miss Brumm’s threadbare view of Hawthorne’s romanticism--those elements that derived from Gothic romance and that were employed “as a disguise for the original theological notions of predestination and cyclical recurrence . . . .” Miss Brumm has detected that disguise, but since in her view Hawthorne did not belong intellectually to his age she fails to seek evidence in his work of the psychological, in effect, the operation of the unconscious mind. This evidence, it strikes me, is so abundant that I need not affront the reader with instances.

For so many years our leading interpreters of American literary thought have struggled to come ever closer to the real nature of American Romanticism in those writers who, demonstrably, have a Calvinistic background. And now Ursula Brumm has identified one of those ancestral elements in typology. The mingling of this inherited habit of thought with modern modes of thought or other modes derived from a remoter past than Calvinism (Neo-Platonism, for example) makes our critical quest endlessly fascinating.

Typology abounds in Melville. Moby-Dick, Ahab, and Ishmael, all have biblical models. Billy Budd, in his full complexity, is the Handsome Sailor, the innocent Adam before the Fall, and in his sacrificial death, the fulfillment of Christ. Melville even viewed historical persons typologically, and Franklin, for example, is a fulfillment of the Old Testament Jacob. Miss Brumm takes Melville’s “linked analogies” in Moby-Dick to be typological. They are part of the message of the novel, pervading nature and the soul and binding the universe together. The symbolic interpretation of actual experience proves Melville an heir to the Calvinist endeavor to find “significances” in the world, and Melville is therefore a high point in Miss Brumm’s demonstration of the transition from typology to symbolism. The view that America herself should share in the future-oriented habit encouraged by typology was inevitable in a writer of Melville’s Calvinistic background and democratic leanings. Perhaps the best passage to show this mingling may be found at the conclusion of chapter 33 in Redburn, a passage that Miss Brumm regrettably omits from her section on Melville. America is hailed as a nation that all may claim as theirs.

We are not a narrow tribe of men. . . . No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother. . . . On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in Eden. . . . The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our children’s children . . . shall all go with their sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire.

Miss Brumm rounds out her treatment of typology with a final chapter on recent works in which the protagonist is a Christ figure, notably Faulkner Light in August and A Fable. Throughout the nineteenth century Christ became increasingly identified with the human being who innocently suffers because life has a pernicious habit of going awry, and Christ’s presence lent “the defeat the splendor of victorious transcendence.” Miss Brumm’s twentieth-century examples merely underscore the fusion of human and divine. In this development one may observe that the original Christian and Calvinistic sinful human being who has salvation through Christ is succeeded by the entirely innocent protagonist of Christ-like purity. We accordingly have two myths and a common element linking them-typology, first in its theological guise and then in its transmuted secular function of symbolism. But we have more. If in A Fable Christianity is “rapacity’s masterpiece,” being an expression of “nations, generals, and heroes on the side of those who crave fame, wealth, and glory” and if Christ “stands on the other side, the side of ordinary people” like the corporal, then, in effect, in the succession of myths, the second has at last savagely turned upon the first with rebellious accusations. Myth has come full circle, and there is an end of myth.

I base these offhand observations on Miss Brumm’s challenging coda, and I should like to add that the one book I think of in connection with American Thought and Religious Typology is Tony Tanner’s The Reign of Wonder, since for me they embrace the two myths present in the American experience. Clearly, apart from the merit of her interpretation of individual writers the signal importance of Miss Brumm’s work lies in her seeing an historical process working itself out. Miss Brumm has rendered us all a great service as much in the speculation she inspires as in the fundamentally sound and rich knowledge she displays.

Typology and the American Renaissance. Contributors: Carl F. Strauch - author. Journal Title: Early American Literature. Volume: 6. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 1971. Page Number: 178.