Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]

by Henry Seidel Canby

The true older generation, of which one seldom hears in current criticism except in terms of abuse, remains to be discovered, and we herewith announce its personnel, so that the next time the youthful writer excoriates it in the abstract all may know just whom he means. Among the older generation in American literature are H. L. Mencken and Mrs. Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington and Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Frank Moore Colby, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps, Edgar Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of the more radicaleditors of New York. Here is this group of desiccated Victorians, upholders of the ethics of Mr. Pickwick, and the artistic theories of Bulwer-Lytton. Here are the bogies of outworn conservatism, numbered like a football team. Mark their names, and know from now on that most of the books that you have supposed were solid in artistry and mature in thought, though perhaps novel in tone or in method, were written by the older generation.

Perhaps when the younger generation pretend to confuse their immediate predecessors with Ruskin and Carlyle, with Browning, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Matthew Arnold, they are merely strategic. For it is still dangerous to assault the citadels of the great Victorians with no greater books than the youthful volumes of 1918-1921, no matter how many breaches the war has left in the walls of their philosophy. It is far easier to assume that they are still alive in pallid survival, and to attack a hypothetic older generation, which, representing nothing real, can therefore not strike back.

Let the younger generation go back to its muttons, let it attend to its most pressing business, which is to create. It is vigorous, prolific, and, to my judgment, full of promise, but so far has done little or nothing not summarized in these words. It must pay its debt to time before it grows much older, or go down among expectations unrealized. It has few hours to waste upon attacking an older generation which, as it is described, does not exist except in youthful imagination, a generation actually of the middle-aged which in the meantime is bearing the burden of invention, creation, revolution in art while the youngsters are talking.

I should like to see less about the younger and more of this older generation in literary criticism. It is a fresh subject, scarcely touched by writers, and full of surprises. The jaded reader should be told that, in spite of rumors to the contrary, the middle-aged still exist.

A LITERATURE OF PROTEST

I have pursued the discussions of the new American realism through university gatherings and literary inquests. Stripped of all metaphysics and relieved of all subtlety the conclusion of the matter is inescapable. It is not the realism of the realists, or the freedom of free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that in itself offends the critics, it is the growing ugliness of American literature. The harsh and often vulgar lines of Masters (so they say) seem to disdain beauty. Vachel Lindsay's shouted raptures are raucous. Miss Lowell's polyphonies have intellectual beauty, but the note is sharp, the splendors pyrotechnic. Robert Frost's restrained rhythms are homely in the single line. The "advanced" novelists, who win the prizes and stir up talk, are flat in style when not muddy in their English. They do not lift. An eighteenth century critic would call American literature ugly, or at least homely, if he dipped into its realities, rococo if he did not.

This is the sum of a criticism so strongly felt that it raises a barrier to appreciation, almost a gate shut against knowledge between the good American readers and the progressives in our literature. Sandburg and Lindsay between them will cause more acrimony in a gathering of English teachers than even Harold Bell Wright. Miss Lowell carries controversy with her, triumphantly riding upon it. Their critics wish form as they have known form, want beauty such as they possess in riper literatures, want maturity, richness, suavity, grace, and the lift of noble thinking, nobly expressed. It may be remarked, in passing, that they also would like to live in English manors in gardened landscapes and have French cathedrals rise above their perfect towns!

It ought to be clear that we shall never get beauty of this kind, or of any absolute kind, in American writing until there is more beauty in American life. Amidst the vulgarities of signboards, cries of cheap newspapers, noisy hustle of trivial commercialism, and the flatness of standardized living, it is hard to feel spiritual qualities higher than optimism and reform. In general, wherever we have touched America we have made it uglier, as a necessary preliminary perhaps to making it anything at all, but uglier nevertheless. There was more hardship perhaps but also more clear beauty in Colonial days than in our own. More clear beauty, we say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty, more complex than what went before, but not yet clarified from the ugly elements that are making it. The forests and the skyscrapers are beautiful in America, but pretty much everything else below and between is soiled or broken by progress and prosperity.

And it is of the things in between, of America in the making, that these new writers, whose lack of pure beauty we deplore, and whose occasional gratuitous ugliness we dislike, are writing. They are protesting against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively than the cloistered reader who recites Shelley, saying "Why can't they write as he does." Like all that is human they share the qualities of their environment, like all fighters they acquire the faults of the enemy. They hate, often enough, the ugliness which a generation of progress has implanted in their own minds. They have been educated, perhaps, by the movies, Main Street conversation, formalized schools, and stale Methodism, and they hate their education. Or like the poets mentioned above they are moved by the pathos, the injustice, the confused beauty, the promise, not of some land of the past, but of the country under their feet, and write of what stirs them in terms that fit.

It is only when one understands this new American writing to be a literature of protest, that one begins to sympathize with its purposes, admire its achievements, and be tolerant of its limitations. For such a literature has very definite limitations. It is preparative rather than ultimate. The spaciousness of great imagination is seldom in it, and it lacks those grand and simple conceptions which generalize upon the human race. It is cluttered with descriptions of the enemy, it is nervous, or morbid, or excited, or over-emphatic. That it strikes out occasional sparks of vivid beauty, and has already produced masterpieces in poetry, is to be wondered at and praised.