In Krutch's autobiography [More Lives Than One], there is a strong sense of crisis, insight and redirection at two points in his career; the result in both instances was a book that seemed to write itself, rapidly, out of a fullness of conviction and intensity of feeling. The first was The Modern Temper; and to the extent that it entailed a deliberate embracing of human values sanctioned by art, history and tradition, it may better be termed a reversion than a conversion. Apparently it saved him from the later Marxist conversion of his contemporaries, as he became in both literary and social criticism a spokesman for a conservative humanism. Experience and Art (1932) developed an aesthetic consonant with the cosmic pessimism of The Modern Temper; in it, he argued for the value of the arts in maintaining an imaginative environment hospitable to human nature, a kind of sanctuary within the inhospitable world revealed by the sciences. Was Europe a Success? (1934) developed a roughly analogous argument for Western culture vis-à-vis the Marxist vision of the future. But throughout these middle years of his career he continued his youthful hobby of amateur microscopic investigations; he bought a rural home in Connecticut, commuting to New York; and in 1948, shortly after completing his study of Thoreau, there came a second book that, like The Modern Temper, seemed to write itself as though flowing naturally from a hidden spring. It was a series of "nature" essays, based on his observations in his garden and through his microscope; and to just the extent that The Modern Temper crystalized his early despair, so did The Twelve Seasons contain the essence of the qualified optimism of the closing decades of his career—"a kind of pantheism," as he later put it, "which was gradually coming to be an essential part of the faith … which would form the basis of an escape from the pessimism of The Modern Temper."
From pessimism to pantheism in twenty years. The Twelve Seasons celebrates the arrival; but it is a pantheism essentially empirical rather than mystical or transcendental, a perception not of nature as mirror of the human spirit but of the human spirit as one of the wonders of nature. The keynote is sounded in the initial essay, in which he is concerned with spring, the historic rituals of rebirth and the absurd technical problems of placing Easter on the calendar each year. Far better, he suggests, to mark the day by the first sound of the spring peepers, the small frogs who voice their new life only when "the temperature has been above freezing often enough and long enough to bring them to life."… Implicit in [one] passage is Krutch's whole postretirement career as natural historian and scientific humanist, an attempt to locate man in the natural order without sacrificing the traditional norms of his humanity. And although it is easy and tempting to identify Thoreau as the tutelary spirit in this conversion, we must consider also his involvement with Samuel Johnson. For Krutch's book on Johnson forms a natural sequence with the earlier Modern Temper, the subsequent study of Thoreau, and the later works of philosophical natural history. The question here is not so much Krutch's status as scholar in regard to these writers as it is the affinities that drew him to them. The relations are complex, but it can be said most simply that Johnson and Thoreau appear as exemplary figures in Krutch's own pantheon—triumphant figures, that is, in whose careers he could discern versions of the dilemma vexing himself. (pp. 270-71)
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