Ku Klux Kriticism1 By ERNEST BOYD LITERARY criticism in this country has, at least, the charm of consistent irrelevancy. With English criticism it shares, of course, the fundamental irrelevancy of the moral, as opposed to the esthetic standard, and is only happy when confronted with literature that is both morally and esthetically good. In the absence of the latter quality the Anglo-Saxon critic, with rare exceptions, is consoled by the former, but in the absence of the former he is so incensed that one naturally draws the inference that the apparent appreciation of the beautiful, of the esthetically perfect, is really conditioned by an appeal to the "moral sense." Benedetto Croce has lived in vain, so far as these worthy arbiters are concerned, as his most prominent American champion recently discovered when 1 Originally published in The Nation (New York), June 20, 1923, and revised by the author for this collection. he had to remind an eminent professor that it was not the immoral and Mediterranean Croce, but the blond and Nordic Emerson who declared that "beauty is its own excuse for being." By way of counteracting this school of criticism America has gradually evolved an opposition partly founded upon the equally irrelevant doctrine that whatever is radical is good. The term "radical" is accepted in the widest and most abusive sense employed by the stupidest conservatives, and may include defiance of the Seventh Commandment and the Eighteenth Amendment, a belief in the Declaration of Independence and the Single Tax, the nationalization of industry and One Big Union. In consequence of this curious readiness to make their own whatever bogies haunt the dreams of their sleepiest adversaries, the left wing extends an affecting tolerance to all literature, however execrable in style and construction, which seems to challenge the existing order. The story of an adultery is admirable, provided it be self-conscious and sordid. If an author has sound views concerning the League of Nations and the release of polit ical prisoners his work is assured of an enthusiastic reception at the hands of critics who would scorn the same naïvetés and crude workmanship in a Harold Bell Wright. Thus the two schools of opinion into which American criticism falls are moved primarily by considerations that are irrelevant to the understanding and appreciation of art. Conservatives of the caliber of George Saintsbury and Anatole France are as rare amongst American critics as are radicals like Georg Brandes. Between the two extremes are a few isolated figures whose influence is as nothing beside that of another and peculiarly indigenous type of criticism which has never quite decided to which school it belongs. These are those influential journalists who write of books with the enthusiasm of auctioneers and speak of them with the tongues of traveling salesmen. They would probably-and certainly rightly -describe themselves as "regular fellows," and they make their standards accordingly. When not preoccupied with the more substantial delights of baseball and poker they emerge to pronounce their emphatic conviction that whatever volume they have last read "sure is some book." These obiter dicta make countless thousands rejoice, and publishers mourn whose wares do not happen to have received this invaluable advertisement. Praise and blame are showered upon the just and the unjust alike, without regard for the possible ethical or esthetic merits or demerits of the works in question. The only author who is certain never to benefit by this apparent impartiality is the author of genuine original talent who has no friends at court. These critics, while emancipated to some degree from the irrelevant considerations that hamper their conservative and radical colleagues, are innocent of critical background and utterly without a sense of values other than news values. In the circumstances it is not surprising that, while a national literature of considerable interest and vitality is growing up in America, American criticism is proving inadequate to the tasks that concern it. In the arts, as in the life of America itself, the same process of growth and evolution is going on, and it is producing results which are curiously parallel. The Ku Klux Klan has its counterpart in Ku Klux Kriticism. It is not the least of the charms of the American scene that ideas once current in influential circles are immediately reflected in mob action. The hooded hooligans who lynch and flog to the greater glory of their Nordic and Protestant God are merely the large scale product of doctrines more discreetly evolved by their betters-dolichocephalic democracy. In all its manifestations the Ku Klux spirit derives its impulse from the resentment provoked by the obvious fact that America is not an Anglo-Saxon country, that numerous infiltrations of race and culture are gradually creating for this country a national identity which is not that of the Colonists, whose names are so often taken in vain. The situation is aggravated by the persistent emergence in every field of American life of these sinister "aliens" who have completely forgotten-if they ever knew it-the tradition which relegated them to subordinate occupations. The new national literature, in particular, would shrink to its old provincial status with remarkable rapidity if the literary lynching bees could only eliminate those names which have not the familiar Anglo-Saxon ring, or do not stand for those ideas which one unconscious |