A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Edited by W. P.
Trent, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman
The reading of these two volumes would give anyone a good basis from which to study modern American literature. The one will-describe to him the -traditions upon which this literature is built ; the other will show him what American critics are up to and what they conceive to be not only their own position but also that of letters in the Great Republic to-day. The history is an abridgment of the four-volume Cambridge History of American Literature, and treats only of the chief figures in the literature of the past. The essays are by many different scholars and all are good. There is less of what Mr. Robert Graves calls the "Old Clothes Man of Literature " element than one might expect in such a volume. But if the book were negligible from all other standpoints (which it is not) it would be more than justified by the essay on " The English Language in America," by Mr. Harry Morgan Ayres. This should be printed in pamphlet form and dis- tributed broadcast both in England and America. It would cause any amount of misunderstanding to dissipate into thin air. Not that the essay is philologically perfect. Mr. Ayres seems to have rather a strange dual concept of Standard English, but in his discussion of the relation of the two branches of the language he is extraordinarily sound and illuminating. The volume of essays on the function and status of criticism in America contains reprinted the more recent pronouncements upon their own craft of such well-known critics as J. E. Spingarn, W. C. Brownell, Van Wyck Brooks, Irving Babbitt, H. L. Mencken, T. S. Eliot, Stuart P. Sherman, G. E. Wood- berry and Ernest Boyd. A greater diversity of views and opinions, all extremely interesting, could hardly be found. They go in the aggregate to show that American criticism is not very different either in function or status from European. It is, however, a lively display.
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