Humanism and America

“Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my table, “aims to be something; while criticism aims first to clarify and then to value something. Criticism is talk about something with a view to passing judgment upon it. It is an aspect of man the valuer, weighing the actions, impulses, passions, thoughts, and imaginings of his fellow-men. Study the criticism of a period and it will show you the state of the general intelligence and the kind of values professed and in vogue, and above all it will enable you to divine the amount of consciousness of life’s processes and meanings which is current in this period.”

“So,” I remarked to the air, “the subject I have been thinking about has some importance? It has to do with man in his most human rôle, that of valuing, and it assists in indicating the range and depth and intensity of his awareness of life.”

But there was no reply to this, and perceiving that I must dig with my own mind, I scratched down what I had previously decided should be my opening sentence. I had been dwelling on the subject of American literary criticism from 1915 to the present. About 1915 a new phase in our national letters began to be manifest. Europe was well drenched in blood and the Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915—events that were vitally to affect us. Mr. Dreiser’s The “Genius” came out, and the next year, 1916, it was suppressed by its publishers out of deference to the power of a narrow censoring body soon to be effectively challenged. American liberals in the wake of Bull Moose Progressivism had hopefully established the New Republic. Mr. P. E. More in the year previous to 1915 had resigned from the editorship of the Nation.

Afterwards there came our participation in the war: the crushing of liberalism: post-war disillusion. There came a ferment of new magazines and new publishers, captivating the sons and leaving the fathers cold. There came a tide of naturalistic novels, a foam of vers libre, a roar of essays attacking the genteel tradition. Since 1915 the reputations have been made of Messrs. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank, H. L. Mencken, and Eugene O’Neill—to name only enough to establish a contrast with the writers of the preceding period. Inevitably it happened that some excitable journalists in the midst of the uprising promptly called this decade and a half an American literary renaissance.

To me, on reviewing these years, they seem more like a tragi-comedy, almost a tragi-farce. So when I penned my premeditated first sentence I spoke of the tragi-comedy of American criticism. But even if our recent criticism has been very often foolish, we are to take it seriously for reasons outside itself,—if my voice out of the air is to be believed. I must now try to develop the line of thought that moves out from the opening sentence I wrote down when my aerial counsellor deserted me.