Most of us, if we
are native born, have been educated by a set of literary
conventions arranged in convenient categories. That is more or
less true of all literary education, but it is particularly true
in the United States, where the formal teaching of English
literature _per se_ began, where, as nowhere else in the
world, there was a great and growing population eager to become
literate and with no literary traditions behind it. The student
from a bookless home learned to think of his literature as
primarily something to be studied; the teacher who had to teach
thousands like him was forced to reduce living literature to dead
categories in order that a little of it at least should be taught.
Thousands of Americans, therefore, of our generation emerged from
their training with a set of literary definitions which they
assumed to be true and supposed to be culture. Only true
definitions of what literature really is can break up such
fossilized defining.
On the other hand, that large proportion of our best reading
population which is not native in its traditions offers a
different but equally important problem. How can the son of a
Russian Jew, whose father lived in a Russian town, who himself has
been brought up in clamorous New York, understand Thoreau, let us
say, or John Muir, or Burroughs, or Willa Cather, without some
defining of the nature of the American environment and the
relation between thought and the soil? How is an intelligent
German-American, whose cultural tradition has been thoroughly
Teutonic, to make himself at home in a literature whose general
character, like its language, is English, without some defining of
the Anglo-American tradition? Lincoln must be defined for him;
Milton must be defined for him; most of all perhaps Franklin must
be defined for him.
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