The true older generation, of which one seldom hears in current
criticism except in terms of abuse, remains to be discovered, and
we herewith announce its personnel, so that the next time the
youthful writer excoriates it in the abstract all may know just
whom he means. Among the older generation in American literature
are H. L. Mencken and Mrs. Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington and
Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Frank Moore Colby,
Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl
Sandburg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps, Edgar
Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of the more radicaleditors
of New York. Here is this group of desiccated Victorians,
upholders of the ethics of Mr. Pickwick, and the artistic theories
of Bulwer-Lytton. Here are the bogies of outworn conservatism,
numbered like a football team. Mark their names, and know from now
on that most of the books that you have supposed were solid in
artistry and mature in thought, though perhaps novel in tone or in
method, were written by the older generation.
Perhaps when the younger generation pretend to confuse their
immediate predecessors with Ruskin and Carlyle, with Browning,
Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Matthew Arnold, they are
merely strategic.
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