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HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D.
Editor of The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post, and amember of the English Department of Yale University.
The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of The Atlantic
Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Century Magazine, The Literary
Review of The New York Evening Post, The Bookman, The Nation, and
The North American Review for permission to reprint such of
these essays as have appeared in their columns.
The unity of this book is to be sought in the point of view of thewriter rather than in a sequence of chapters developing a singletheme and arriving at categorical conclusions. Literature in acivilization like ours, which is trying to be both sophisticatedand democratic at the same moment of time, has so many sources andso many manifestations, is so much involved with our socialbackground, and is so much a question of life as well as of art,that many doors have to be opened before one begins to approach anunderstanding. The method of informal definition which I havefollowed in all these essays is an attempt to open doors throughwhich both writer and reader may enter into a better comprehensionof what novelists, poets, and critics have done or are trying toaccomplish. More than an entrance upon many a vexed controversyand hidden meaning I cannot expect to have achieved in this book;but where the door would not swing wide I have at least tried toput one foot in the crack. The sympathetic reader may find his ownway further; or may be stirred by my endeavor to a deeperappreciation, interest, and insight. That is my hope.
New York, April, 1922.
The Oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more puzzling thanthe average American. We admit that we are hard, keen, practical,—the adjectives that every casual European