Soon the Mediterranean races domiciled here will pass into
literary expressiveness. It is as impossible that we should not
have criticism of the national tradition expressed in our
literature as that an international congress should agree upon
questions of ethics or religion.
And of course the new internationalism, which is far more vigorous
than appears on the surface, favors such criticism. The war
brought America and Europe two thousand miles closer, and the
habit of interest in what Europeans are thinking, once acquired,
is not likely to be lost. No American writer of promise can hope
now to escape comparison with the literatures of Western Europe,
and comparison means a new impulse to criticism.
Fundamental, creative criticism--like Sainte-Beuve's, Matthew
Arnold's, Walter Pater's, like Dryden's, Brunetiere's, De
Gourmont's, or Croce's--will presumably come. The conditions, both
of publication and of audience, are ripe for it now in the United
States. But there is a good deal of spade work in the study of
literature to be done first, and still more education of the
reading American mind. One reason why Lowell was not a great
critic was because his scholarship was defective, or, to put it
more fairly, because the scholarship of his contemporaries, with
whose knowledge he might have buttressed his own, was incomplete.
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