The Alaska daily empire., 1922-02-24
Prize What You Have"
(Literary Review. )

NN'' but all that usually learned from it was that an unknown something neither vegetable nor mineral, but did begin with P Clvillzaton Ill the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty (somewha' bilious) Americans' has of the same de1ects' We learn that Americans not honest In thelr journalism that they are feminine in their intel lectual life; that they do not have confidence Ill their literature that they do not love advenurousy onoueh. that they are not scientific in their medi- cine, and twenty-five other nots and ares, which might explain just what is the matter With the
 nited States if they were not sef-contradctory put in no sense describe the civilization of America
 No one ever yet understood civilization by ask ing what the matter with it. No one ever yet understood by asking what were his diseases The point of view is wrong for understanding. The method is incomplete. If this American symposium had been entitled like a Puritan tract The Thirty Grievous Errors of America" we should nave been less critical for there many more than thirty errors in the United States and some of them are oundly analysed and properly excoriated in this volume. But only in the heyday of intolerance do we expect to find nation summed up by its faults
 No one of these thirty writers approves of America except the three foreigners English, Irish and Italian who like living here much better than the others, probably because they have lived elsewhere Even Mr. Van Loon, who is now citizen and so does not count as foreigner, makes it clear in his excellent article on history that the human race is to be blamed for certain faults he finds in America But the natives, with exceptions, do not discriminate Every vice of materialism ndustriasm, vugarity, and in tellectua suggshness which in one phase or an other is cropping out everywhere in this poor half civilized earth they describe in it's specialized Ameri- can form and charge against America Have they ever lived in Branch provincial towns, ever gone through the back country of England, ever visited Naples Dublin, talked to Russian, or been shut up in compartment with North German. old style? Are the chosen people that we should have of Jeremiahs to domesticate the sins of the world in America For indeed the last lines of these melancholy chapters sound like the walls of the prophets Jerusalem.
 Here is MT. Van Wyck Brooks saying that we lack self-confdence in our creative literature, and writing of it in the very vein winch Bernard Shaw opened for the English phstine. Here is Harold Stearns complaining of the feminization of cul- ture as if in Europe ripe and masculine culture be noted in every estamine and vicarage Here is Mrs. Parsons in serious stew over sex in Am erca and the too easy comradeship between boys and girls, if France and Austria had settled sat isfactoriy the problems of sex, while, sunk in the depths of inhibition we alone were to be deplored. Thirty trips to Europe (from which few authors might be excused) should precede the second edition of this book.
 It is not, however, the matter much the manner of the volume which calls forth this editorial. The matter, much of it. is ndisputabe facts, most of them, be challenged, although when we read in MT. Stearns chapter that the literature of our first half century was frankly derivative from England and Europe" and made pretensions to being intrnscally American" join MT. Mencken and MT. Searns himself in praying God to send us tcholars who will know tne1r subjects before they begin write If Emerson and Thoreau and flaw
 horne are not intrinsically American, and this book s, then like Falstaf will be shotten herring.
 Yet it is not, a rule, the assertions is the tempt to sum up civilization by describing it's faults that we violently deprecate. Such attempt is neither judcious scholarly; it is condemned the outset to capriciousness; it challenges the writer 'ay, not what he makes of America, which is diff Tult, but what he finds wrong in the United States Iwhich is easy It gives false tone of merely de- ttructive criticism to the soundes articles and makes
 captious survey of what might have been an at
 understand moi he Dratti probably the most hopeful but certainly the most Pvieorous and rapidly varying civilization on a large
 cale since the ebuient days of the first century be- fore Christ.