CLASSIC AMERICANS By Henry Seidel Canby
There is in America to-day a very strong attempt to break away completely from the European tradition, and in par- ticular from that of the English. Like many critics, Mr. 'Canby, editor of the American Saturday Review of Literature, -pleads in 'his Classic Americans from Irving to Whitman (Humphrey Milford, 12s. 6d.) for a pure American literature rather than a superficial imitation of the English. He tries to represent Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, 'Thoreau, Irving and Cooper as inevitable American writers.. denying any foreign influence. He is eager that these men should be recognized first as Americans, and throughout the book this theme is constantly reiterated. Scholars in America, he maintains, have given too much significance to the value of European ascendancy. The same theme is carried into the field of psychology," a word too often used loosely in this book, and a long account is given of the Colonial, Calvinist and Republican background which it is hoped will help to make clear the American to himself and, in particular, his relation to these writers. " Our native literature," he stresses, "has a value for Americans as an index to their emo- tional and intellectual life and American literature deserves to be studied in its American aspects." Poe is treated mainly as a journalist, and in discussing The Purloined Letter he remarks : '' The detective story, of which this is the prototype, is, if you please, all fudge. But it is good fudge, and fudge is what we read it for." Emerson he regards as the Dionysos of Puritan moralism : " He is the vital spirit of intellectual joy breaking out in a New England become numb and dead except to industrial development and dry moralizing." The ardent cultivation of the short story in America is explained. The best chapter is, however, on Hawthorne and Melville, treated together, but the book is written in complicated, confused style, often rhetorical, with a strained use of words ; there is little which has not already been published in Classic Americans, but for the reader eager for a book written by an. American on these Americans it is certainly interesting.
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