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.
It is not surprising that discontent with our own ultimately
English tradition has expressed itself by a kind of Freudian
transformation in anti-English sentiment. Every vigorous nation
strains and struggles with its tradition, like a growing boy with
his clothes, and this is particularly true of new nations with old
traditions behind them. Our pains are growing pains--a malady we
have suffered from since the early eighteenth century at the
latest.
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