The sun., 1918-11-17

"Eeny, meeny, miny mo? SHAKESPEARE. com
mercial fellow who wrote plays for a living, knew
this when he let one of his characters sing;
''When that was and little tiny boy,
With hey, no. the wind and the RAIN,
foolish thing was but toy,
For the rain it raneth every day.
And little earlier in TTclfh Nigbt
Like mad lad,
Pare thy nails, dad;
Adeu goodman devil.
Which is not only beautiful as sound, but without
the least sense unless it hath the vulgar1ty to be
looked for in the work of a mercenary playwright
The Case for the Writers of To-day.
But the strangest thing about the proceedings in
the Critical Court is their lack of contemporary in
terest Rarely, indeed, is anything decided here
until it has been decided everywhere else For the
great decisions are the decisions of life and not de-
eisions on the past. has written twenty
books and he is dead He is ripe for consideration
by the Critical Court A man has written two
novels and has eighteen ahead of him. The
Critical Court will leave him alone until he is past
all helping 1t never to occur to the critic
Judge that young man who has written two
novels is more important than dead man who has
written twenty novels. For the young man who has
written two novels has some novels yet to be writ
ten; he can be helped, strengthened, encouraged,
advised, corrected, warned counselled, rebuked,
praised, blamed presented with bills of particulars,
and-heartened. If he has not genius nothing can
put it in him, but if he has, many things can be done
to help him exploit it. And a man who is dead
cannot be affected by anything you say or do; the
critic judge has lost his chance of shaping that
writer's work and can no longer write decree,
only an epitaph.
TO be brutaly frank: Nobody cares what the
Critical Court thinks of WHITMAN or Poe or
LoNGFELLow or HAWTHORNE. Everybody cares
what HARRINGTON does next, what MARY JOHN
sTON tackles, what the developments are in the
William Allen White case, what becomes of JOSEPH
HERGEsHEIMER, whether AMY LOWELL achieves
great work in that contrapuntal poetry she calls
polyphonic prose. On these things depend the
present era in American literature and the posi-
bilities of the future And these things are more
or less under our control.
The people of America not only believe that there
is an independent American literature, but they
believe that there will continue to be. Some Of
them believe in the past of that literature some Of
them believe in its future; but all of them believe
in its present and its presence Their voice may be
stfed in the Critical Court (silence in the courts!
but it is audible everywhere else. 1t is heard in
the bookshOps where piles of new fiction melt away,
where war verse is in brisk demand, where new
biographies and historical works are bought daily
and where books on all sorts of weighty subjects
flake down from the shelves into the hands of Gus
toners.
The voice of the American people is articuate in
the offices of newspapers which deal with the news
of new books 1t makes a seismOgraphic record in
the ledgers of publishing houses. 1t comes to
almost every writer in letters of inquiry comment
and commentator. What, do you suppose,
writer like GENE STRATToN-P PORTER cares whether
the Critical Court excludes her work condemns
it? She can reread hundreds and thousands Of
letters from men and women who tell her how pro-
foundly her books have-tickled their fancy?
pleased their love of verbal beauty? taxed their in
tellecuais to understand? No. merely how pro-
foundly her books have altered their whole lives.
Hear We. Hear We! Hear ye! The Critical
Court is in session. All who have business with the