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
What is to be done about it? Shall anything be done about it? The
Anglomaniac is helpless before the fact of language. The most he
can do is to attack, and uproot if he can, the American tradition.
There is nothing sacrosanct in this American tradition. Like all
traditions it is stiff, it will clasp, if we allow it, the future
in the dead hand of precedent. It can be used by the designing to
block progress. But as traditions go it is not conservative.
Radicalism, indeed, is its child. Political and religious
radicalism brought the Pilgrims to New England, the Quakers to
Pennsylvania; political and economic radicalism made the
Revolution against the will of American conservatives; political
and social radicalism made the Civil War inevitable and gave it
moral earnestness. Radicalism, whether you like it or not, is much
more American than what some people mean by "Americanism" to-day.
And its bitterest opponents in our times would quite certainly
have become Nova Scotian exiles if they had been alive and
likeminded in 1783.
Nor is this American tradition impeccable in the political ideas,
the literary ideals, the social customs it has given us. We must
admit a rampant individualism in our political practices which is
in the very best Anglo-American tradition, and yet by no means
favorable to cooperative government. We admit also more Puritanism
in our standard literature than art can well digest; and more
sentiment than is good for us; nor is it probable that the
traditions and the conventions which govern American family life
are superior to their European equivalents. We should welcome (I
do not say that we do) liberalizing, broadening, enriching
influences from other traditions. And whether we have welcomed
them or not, they have come, and to our great benefit. But to
graft upon the plant is different from trying to pull up the
roots.
We want better arguments than the fear of Anglo-Saxon domination
before the root pulling begins. We wish to know what is to be
planted. We desire to be convinced that the virtue has gone out of
the old stock. We want examples of civilized nations that have
profited by borrowing traditions wholesale, or by inventing them.
We wish to know if a cultural, a literary sans-culottism is
possible, except with chaos as a goal. Most of all, we expect to
fight for and to hold our Anglo-American heritage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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