PREFACE

SINCE about the year 1912, and especially since the Great War, America has experienced a new self-consciousness. We have been increasingly eager, not only to reveal our present inadequacies, but also to understand and revalue our achievement in the past particularly our literature. We have expressed ourselves in a literary criticism probably less perfunctory, more fresh and alert, more energetic and abundant, than that of any previous epoch in our three centuries of history. We have grown deeply interested in criticism itself, in criteria and methods, and also in the development of criticism in America: in the conditions that have shaped it, in the aims and temper of the critics, in the standards that they employed, and in the issues that they debated.

When the final volumes of the 'Cambridge History of American Literature' were published a few years after the war, the editors candidly admitted that 'the number of pioneer tasks still to be undertaken in the study of American literature was larger than could be entirely foreseen.' In a review of the work I ventured to point out, as one of the most important of the untried tasks, an account of the history of our literary criticism. After considering undertaking this task myself, I came to the conclusion that the time for it was not ripe; that before it could be carried out with anything like finality a number of monographs would have to be written on special periods and problems. I came to feel, also, that some of these limited studies would be of more immediate value than an historical survey. Among these studies I eventually selected a critical analysis of the literary creeds that have been most impressively set forth in this country. It seemed to me that if these creeds were thoroughly exam

ined we might come to a better understanding of the dominant motives of our creative literature in the past.

Since light on the past is always light on the present and future, it seemed to me, furthermore, that a serious confrontation of the standards adopted in the nineteenth century might in some measure illuminate the chaos into which our criticism has fallen. Admittedly, there is a striking contrast between the standardization of our life in general and the absence of standards in our literature and our thinking about literature. In the main our critics appear to have abdicated their responsibility and privileges in favor of an openmindedness that is with difficulty distinguished from vacuity. By so doing, they have given up their powers to the publishers and the editors, whose standards, being mainly commercial, are mainly low. Publishers and editors are chiefly concerned, not with what the public ought to want and the best of the public does want, but with what the majority want or are supposed to want. If the professional critics are to regain leadership, they will have to learn to be leaders rather than mere observers. So long as their open minds contain nothing but the passing winds of doctrine, so long as they dally with the fashions of the moment instead of putting on the armor of tried standards, they will be impotent to lead. It is a hopeful sign when a writer like Floyd Dell, in the concluding paragraph of his 'Intellectual Vagabondage, an Apology for the Intelligentsia,' looks forward to a younger generation that shall have the courage to formulate conventions (italics his). The paramount need of the times, in literary criticism as in other activities, is a convention (a 'coming-together') that shall wisely use and not willfully reject the traditions of the past. Upon the assertion, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did,' the only sensible comment is that of T. S. Eliot: 'Precisely, and they are that which we know.' Perhaps we are beginning to suspect, as our interest in outlines and stories of philosophy,

science, history, etc., would seem to indicate, that 'that which we know' is never remote and irrelevant, but always present and serviceable.

I am indebted to several persons who have been so kind as to read portions of this book in manuscript or in proofsheets; particularly Charles Cestre, Professor of American Literature and Civilization in the University of Paris; Friedrich Schoenemann, Lecturer in American Literature and Civilization in the University of Berlin; and Chester Penn Higby, Professor of Modern History in the University of Wisconsin. I am indebted to the editors of 'Studies in Philology' (1923, 1927) and 'Publications of the Modern Language Association' (1926) for permission to reprint three excerpts that first appeared in those journals and are now incorporated in this book; and in the Introduction I have sketched a rationale of American literary history similar to that which I first published in the preface of 'American Poetry and Prose' (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925) and in an article in the 'Saturday Review of Literature' for April 3, 1926. Portions of the book were originally presented as lectures in the universities of Illinois (1925) and Munich and Berlin (1928). NORMAN FOERSTER