Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]Canby, Henry Seidel
History
Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]
Canby, Henry Seidel
American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Criticism; English fiction -- History and criticism
"Anglo-Saxon domination," even in an anti-British meeting, cannot
and does not mean English domination; it can mean only control of
America by the so-called Anglo-Saxon element in our population.
The quarrel is local, not international. The "Anglo-Saxon" three
thousand miles away who cannot hit back is a scapegoat, a whipping
boy for the so-called "Anglo-Saxon" American at home.
What is an "Anglo-Saxon" American? Presumably he is the person
familiar in "want" advertisements: "American family wants boarder
for the summer. References exchanged." But this does not help us
much. He is certainly not English. Nothing is better established
than the admixture of bloods since the earliest days of our
nationality. That I, myself, for example, have ancestral portions
of French, German, Welsh, and Scotch, as well as English blood in
my veins, makes me, by any historical test, characteristically
more rather than less American. Race, indeed, within very broad
limits, is utterly different from nationality, and it is usually
many, many centuries before the two become even approximately
identical. The culture I have inherited, the political ideals I
live by, the literature which is my own, most of all the language
that I speak, are far more important than the ultimate race or
races I stem from, obviously more important, since in thousands of
good Americans it is impossible to determine what races have gone
to their making. There is no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon
American--and so few English Americans that they are nationally
insignificant.
An American with a strong national individuality there certainly
is, and it is true that his traditions, irrespective of the race
of his forbears, are mainly English; from England he drew his
political and social habits, his moral ideas, his literature, and
his language. This does not make him a "slave to England," as our
most recent propagandists would have it; it does not put him in
England's debt. We owe no debt to England. Great Britain, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and ourselves are deeply in
debt to our intellectual, our spiritual, our aesthetic ancestors
who were the molders of English history and English thought, the
interpreters of English emotion, the masters of the developing
English _mores_ that became our _mores_, and have since continued
evolution with a difference. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and
Milton, Wycliffe, Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley, Elizabeth, Cromwell, and
the great Whigs, these made the only tradition that can be called
Anglo-Saxon, and if we have an American tradition, as we assuredly
have, here are its roots. This is our "Anglo-Saxon domination."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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