Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]

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HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D.
Editor of The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post , and a member of the English Department of Yale University.
The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Century Magazine, The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post, The Bookman, The Nation, and The North American Review for permission to reprint such of these essays as have appeared in their columns.
The unity of this book is to be sought in the point of view of the writer rather than in a sequence of chapters developing a single theme and arriving at categorical conclusions. Literature in a civilization like ours, which is trying to be both sophisticated and democratic at the same moment of time, has so many sources and so many manifestations, is so much involved with our social background, and is so much a question of life as well as of art, that many doors have to be opened before one begins to approach an understanding. The method of informal definition which I have followed in all these essays is an attempt to open doors through which both writer and reader may enter into a better comprehension of what novelists, poets, and critics have done or are trying to accomplish. More than an entrance upon many a vexed controversy and hidden meaning I cannot expect to have achieved in this book; but where the door would not swing wide I have at least tried to put one foot in the crack. The sympathetic reader may find his own way further; or may be stirred by my endeavor to a deeper appreciation, interest, and insight. That is my hope.
New York, April, 1922.
The Oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more puzzling than the average American. We admit that we are hard, keen, practical, —the adjectives that every casual European applies to us,—and yet any book-store window or railway news-stand will show that we prefer sentimental magazines and books. Why should a hard race—if we are hard—read soft books?