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
The review has come to its own with the war and reconstruction;
which, considering its handicaps, is another argument that the
family magazine should heed the sharpening of the American
intellect. But, except for the strongest members of the family, it
is still struggling, and still dependent for long life upon
cheapness of production rather than breadth of appeal.
The difficulty is not so much with the readers as the writers. The
review must largely depend upon the specialist writer (who alone
has the equipment for specialist writing), and the American
specialist cannot usually write well enough to command general
intelligent attention. This is particularly noticeable in the
minor reviews where contributions are not paid for and most of the
writing is, in a sense, amateur, but it holds good in the
magazines and the national reviews also. The specialist knows his
politics, his biology, or his finance as well as his English or
French contemporary, but he cannot digest his subject into words
--he can think into it, but not out of it, and so cannot write
acceptably for publication. Hence in science particularly, but
also in biography, in literary criticism, and less often in
history, we have to depend frequently upon English pens for our
illumination.
The reasons for this very serious deficiency, much more serious
from every point of view than the specialists realize, are well
known to all but the specialists, and I do not propose to enter
into them here. My point is that this very defect, which has made
it so difficult to edit a valid and interesting review (and so
creditable to succeed as we have in several instances succeeded),
is a brake also upon the family magazine in its attempt to regain
virility. The newspaper magazines have cornered the market for
clever reporters who tap the reservoirs of special knowledge and
then spray it acceptably upon the public. This is good as far as
it goes, but does not go far. The scholars must serve us
themselves--and are too often incapable.
Editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by the difficulty
of finding these intellectualized old Americans who have drifted
away from the old magazines and are being painfully collected in
driblets by the weeklies and the reviews. They do not,
unfortunately for circulation, all live in a London, or Paris.
They are scattered in towns, cities, university communities,
lonely plantations, all over a vast country. Probably that
intellectualized public upon which all good magazines as well as
all good reviews must depend, has not yet become so stratified and
homogeneous after the upheavals of our generation that a
commercial success of journalistic magnitude is possible, but it
can and must be found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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