This mistaking of prudery for decency, this unwillingness to deal quite frankly with life as it is, has perhaps acted with a narrowing and weakening effect upon the course of American literature in the past. But just now there seems to be a reaction toward the other extreme. Among certain English and American writers, especially of the female sex, there is a new fashion of indiscriminate candour which would make Balzac blush. But I suppose that this will pass, since every extreme carries within itself the seed of disintegration.
The morale of literature, after all, does not lie outside of the great circle of ethics. It is a simple application of the laws which embrace the whole of human life to the specific business of a writer.
To speak the truth; to respect himself and his readers; to do justly and to love mercy; to deal with language as a living thing of secret and incalculable power; not to call good, evil, or evil, good; to honour the noble and to condemn the base; to face the facts of life with courage, the humours of life with sympathy, and the mysteries of life with reverence; and to perform his task of writing as carefully, as lovingly, as well as he can,—this, it seems to me, is the whole duty of an author.
This, if I mistake not, has been the effort of the chief writers of America. They have spoken surely to the heart of a great people. They have kept the fine ideals of the past alive in the conflicts of the present. They have lightened the labours of a weary day. They have left their readers a little happier, perhaps a little wiser, certainly a little stronger and braver, for the battle and the work of life.
The measure of their contribution to the small group of world-books, the literature that is universal in meaning and enduring in form, must be left for the future to determine. But it is sure already that American literature has done much to express and to perpetuate the Spirit of America.
[1] The lectures which followed, at the Sorbonne, on Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Poe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, Whitman, and Present Tendencies in American Literature, are not included in this volume.
HERBERT CROLY’S
The Promise of American Life
Cloth, 12mo, $2.00 net
President J. G. Schurman of Cornell University writes of this book: “I regard Mr. Croly’s book as a serious and weighty contribution to contemporary American politics. A treatise on the fundamental political ideas of the American people which attempts to develop their full content and to re-read American history in the light of these developed ideas cannot, of course, be made light literature; but the author brings to the weighty subject with which he deals a lucid and vivacious style and a logical sense of arrangement. And thoughtful readers who are interested in fundamental political principles, once they have started the book, are pretty certain to finish it.... For my own part I have found the book exceedingly stimulating. It is also instructive, for the author seems to be thoroughly versed in the modern political and economic history not only of America but of Europe as well. Finally, the volume has the immense attraction of dealing with a subject which of all political subjects is now most prominent in the mind not only of thoughtful citizens, but, one might almost say, of the American people.”