makes alien their fatherlands, and strangers of their children.
This is an "Anglo-Saxon" domination. But it is useless to struggle
against it.

There is a similar discomfort among certain American authors,
especially just now, when, for the first time since the Civil War
and the materialism that succeeded it, we are finding our national
self once again in literature. Mr. Mencken and Mr. Dreiser have
vigorously expressed this annoyance with American tradition. They
wish to break with it--at least Mr. Dreiser does--break with it
morally, spiritually, aesthetically. Let the dotards, he says, bury
their dead.

Mr. Mencken wishes to drive us out of Colonialism. He says that
Longfellow has had his day, and that it is time to stop imitating
Addison, time to be ashamed of aping Stevenson, Kipling, or John
Masefield. He is right.

But when it comes to disowning English literature and the past of
American literature (as many a writer directly or by implication
would have us) in order to become 100 per cent American, let us
first take breath long enough to reflect that, first, such a
madcap career is eminently undesirable, and, second, utterly
impossible. It is a literature which by general admission is now
the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech.
English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than
French, less homely than German, but more expressive, more
flexible, than these and all others. Its syntax imposes no
burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the
bizarre. Without its literary history, American literature in