SAVING THE BABE IN THE BULRUSHES

American Literature, writes this very modern Englishman, like the Russian has come to a real verge. "The furthest frenzies of the French modernism or futurism have not reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached." These Americans "refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. They revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth safely swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, and deposited among the reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe." Needless to say, Mr. Lawrence will play the kind-hearted daughter of Pharach to rescue the infant Truth whom we have abandoned.

And it must be admitted that the author has done the best he could, laboring under the thesis that all American writers have been liars. This preconceived notion is unfortunate; it has led him to see only some of the works of a few of our writers, and those with a beam in his eye. He has not considered much of the finest American literature.

"Old Daddy Franklin", he writes, "knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American . . . He made himself a list of virtues which he trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock". He addresses the shade of Crevecoeur with this wagging finger: "Hector St. John, you have lied to me. You lied even more scurrilously to yourself. Hector St. John, you are an emotional liar". Fenimore Cooper felt himself superior to the bourgoise but would not admit it, and therefore lied. "The blue-eyed darling Nathaniel (Hawthorne) knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise". And so the same through Dana, Melville and Whitman. "Always the same. The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under consciousness so devilish".

The "dummy American" manufactured out of whole cloth by Franklin, and the age which produced him, has been bandied about by the subsequent writers until by the time of Walt Whitman there is nothing to do but to paw over the shredded remains. In him Mr. Lawrence finds "all that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth". Whitman is at the end of the road, at the very verge of the precipice.

In the meantime, when Walt is tottering into oblivion with his soul leaking out his every poro, down in the valley Mr. Lawrence is pulling the truth from the bulrushes. This he is presenting us as a gift. But in order that we shall not overlook his gift, he calls attention to the act with a great cracking and smashing of old classics. We must be thankful to this kindly Englishman, doubly so because he has left us so many of our favorite authors untouched.