humorist has designated "the genius of America."

Hence the rise of Ku Klux Kriticism, which would see to it that American literature be Nordic, Protestant, and blond. One does not expect an intelligible or reasoned confession of faith from the exponents of this democratic method of grappling with national problems; theirs is not to reason why but to do . . . and make the other fellow die. The Ku Kluxers of criticism are, in this respect, true to type, for the most part. They content themselves with a general denial of the right of any person whose name seems "foreign" to speak on behalf of America. One of their number, however, has undertaken a more or less coherent exposition of the ideas and ideals that animate the Klan in its literary operations. In his volume, On Contemporary Literature, Professor Stuart Sherman arrives at the crescendo of his appreciation of Mark Twain in a phrase which is at once an illuminating irrelevancy and a declaration of the Ku Klux faith: in impassioned italics he exclaims that Mark Twain "was an American." Then, feeling, perhaps, that this admirable virtue hardly

seems adequate as a summary of the qualities which entitle Mark Twain to his position in American literature, Professor Sherman continues: "To the foreign critic this ultimate tribute may seem perplexingly cheap and anticlimactic. That is, of course, due to the mistaken notion that we number some fivescore millions of Americans. As a matter of fact, we number our Americans on our ten fingers; the rest of us are merely citizens of the United States. Any one who will take the trouble to be born may become a citizen. To become an American requires other talents."

This metaphysical and ingenuous distinction between "Americans" and "citizens of the United States" is an attempt to rationalize the position of the Ku Klux Klan. Its fundamental assumption is that America is not a nation in the process of evolution, drawing its life from the various races that are helping to build it up, but an Anglo-Saxon colony unfortunately afflicted by the influx of aliens. In "Americans" the same critic carries his theory a step further by explicitly recognizing the heterogeneous character of the American people and as explicitly rejecting these, to him, exotic

elements in its composition. "This latest generation of Americans," he writes, “so vulgar and selfish and good-humored and sensual and impudent, shows little trace of the once dominant Puritan stock and nothing of the Puritan temper. It is curiously and richly composed of the children of parents who dedicated themselves to accumulation and, toiling inarticulately in shop and field, in forest and mine, never fully mastered the English definite article or the personal pronoun. It is composed of children whose parents or grandparents brought their copper kettles from Russia, tilled the soil of Hungary, taught the Mosaic law in Poland, cut Irish turf, ground optical glass in Germany, dispensed Bavarian beer, or fished for mackerel around the Skagerrack." No exception need be taken to this more or less accurate illustration of the development of America. What is interesting is the typical Ku Klux revolt against the implications and consequences of this development.

The professors of blond Nordic literature hold this new generation responsible for all the ills which, in their opinion, infest the republic of letters. The writers who disturb their aca

demic calm bear names suggestive of those lesser breeds whose parental history Professor Sherman has outlined. The critics who champion this new literature are similarly tainted, and its public is exclusively composed of the newly emancipated children of once humble slaves. Of the critics we are told that "however it may be connected with the house of Jesse," it is not a group "which should be expected to hear any profound murmurings of ancestral voices or to experience any mysterious inflowing of national experience in meditating on the names of Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln, Emerson, Franklin and Bradford." As for the readers whose tastes are guided by these critics, they revel in "the English paradoxers and mountebanks, the Scandinavian misanthropes, the German egomaniacs, and, above all, in the later Russian novelists, crazy with war, taxes, hunger, anarchy, vodka and German philosophy." Here is heard the raucous note of the Know Nothing movement, the instinctive revolt of the mandarin against "foreign devils," with, of course, the inevitable echo of belated English controversies concerning Ibsen and Strindberg

and Nietzsche. Be Anglo-Saxon or be forever silent is the exhortation of the critical Ku Klux to the false prophets of Americanism, whose heresy it is that in this great welter of races and creeds and cultures the "ancestral voices" of only one group should not be heard.

The alternative to what has been facetiously named "the Loyal Independent Order of United Hiberno-German-Anti-English Americans" is a mysterious something described as "essential Americanism," which automatically excludes whole races and traditions which are becoming, in an essentially American manner, an integral part of America. Emerson, it

seems, was wrong when he uttered his immoral dictum concerning Beauty, for, in spite of "ancestral voices," Professor Sherman did not recognize its Anglo-Saxon authenticity. In place of what appeared to be a characteristically perverse sentiment, inspired by vodka or German egomania in those who are undermining the Puritan stamina of America, he substituted the statement that "beauty has a heart full of service." Thence it followed that art in America must serve the community; it must justify