Art or entertainment

Abstract

The Machine in the Garden is a "big" book 365 pages of text and the reader has the right to expect a certain amount of comprehensiveness, not to say complexity, in such a work. Here Mr. Marx disappoints us. Like most critics pushing a thesis, he deftly finds what he was looking for. But in the process he overlooks more significant material than he finds. Thus as a critique of "the collective imagination," The Machine in the Garden is perfunctory because it fails to deal with both the cultural phenomena of Puritanism, Southwestern humor and nineteenth-century Utopianism and the imaginative phenomena of the visual arts of painting, architecture and landscape gardening. As a study of American literature it is deficient because it omits, on the one hand, any serious discussion of such important literary figures as Edwards, Cooper, Poe, James, Crane and Howells while it fails, on the other, to explore "the middle landscape" depicted by such relevant minor writers as Freneau, Brown, Norris, Donnelly and Jack London. Just as passing comments about Cole, Inness and Sheeler are no substitute for the systematic application of "the pastoral ideal" to the entire landscape tradition from Allston through Homer to Marin, so a chapter devoted to "Shakespeare's American play," The Tempest, cannot compensate for the virtual omission of seventeenth-century American writing. Throughout Mr. Marx subjugates "the collective imagination" to the thesis. Why else would he explore the eighteenth-century idea of "the garden" almost totally through Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia and Jefferson's Notes on Virginia without ever mentioning New England? Why else would he misread Royall Tyler's The Contrast so blatantly, making the country bumpkin, Jonathan, the embodiment of "the values of the middle