SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM
There has been no really fundamental discussion of American scholarship or American criticism. Those who merely seek a good historical sketch of our older literary scholarship, along conventional lines, will find one in the fourth volume of the “Cambridge History of American Literature” that is at all events vastly superior to the similar chapters in the “Cambridge History of English Literature.” But more illuminating than any formal treatise are the comments on our scholarly ideals and methods in Emerson’s famous address on “The American Scholar,” in “The Education of Henry Adams,” and in the “Letters” of William James. The “Cambridge History of American Literature” contains no separate chapter on American criticism, and the treatment of individual critics is pathetically inadequate. The flavour of recent criticism may be savoured in Ludwig Lewisohn’s interesting anthology, “A Modern Book of Criticism,” where the most buoyant and “modern” of our younger men are set side by side with all their unacademic masters and compeers of the contemporary European world. All that can be said in favour of the faded moralism of the older American criticism is urged in an article on “The National Genius” in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1921, the temper of which may be judged from this typical excerpt: “When Mr. Spingarn declares that beauty is not concerned with truth or morals or democracy, he makes a philosophical distinction which I have no doubt that Charles the Second would have understood, approved, and could, at need, have illustrated. But he says what the American schoolboy knows to be false to the history of beauty in this country. Beauty, whether we like it or not, has a heart full of service.” The case against the conservative and traditional type of criticism is presented with slapdash pungency in the two volumes of H. L. Mencken’s “Prejudices.” But any one can make out a case for himself by reading the work of any American classical scholar side by side with a book by Gilbert Murray, or any history of literature by an American side by side with Francesco de Sanctis’s “History of Italian Literature,” or the work of any American critic side by side with the books of the great critics of the world.
J. E. S.