What they said

These days I find myself deeply fond of XX century thinking.

From Volume IV Number IV
The New Criterion A Quarterly Review October 1926
New York Chronicle: Gilbert Seldes

There is an attitude of mind familiar to observers of American intellectuals which Europeans ought to understand; I find it so often undermining my own judgement that it would be unfair of me not to state it. It is the tendency to misprise the purely American thing, the provincial or the local, as a method of glorifying whatever in our arts has the pretension of being universal. For example, although I am keenly interested in the natural development of those cadences and rhythms which, much more than slang and individual words, are making the American language, I can find nothing attractive in the nasalities, the hard utterances, or the drawls which give us, in various parts of the country, the American accent. We are hardly ever pleased by the literary or social success of anyone or anything because of American ?quaintness?; to ourselves we are neither picturesque nor quaint, and except for those who are trying to isolate America artistically as well as in politics, we wish to be loved as equals. I can see no impropriety in this attitude, and am actually concerned with its results. The popular and journalistic success of Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s novels was remarkable; yet it remained for the English critics to hail them as exceptionally fine works of art in the satiric vein; to us they were rather pedestrain reporting only interesting for their temperamental dislike of our commercial middle class, a dislike which we had passed through perhaps ten years earlier, and had lacked the acumen or the energy to record, probably because we felt the whole thing had been done by the French Romanticists and had achieved perfection in Madame Bovary. (…)