DAWN?

Recent criticism of American literature has definitely approved the direction contemporary writers are taking. The evident appreciation of background by the younger men who have persisted in recording their contempt for American verse, civilization in the western world, is tending toward a social literature out of which that he no said quoi of greatness can only come. Dreisers and dos Passos, Lewises and their compeers are throwing the shafts of their wit into the obscurity of apparent dullness, are really, in short, lighting the stage of American letters.

But what has one to build his faith in a great literature to build on? It might be believed that this is to be another palace for a pauper. Yet consideration by the critical mind discredits this. The stage must be set before the actors can come. And the actors in this case are real literary characters who, unlike the usual puppets of modern fiction, live not alone on their own pages but in the memories of those who read the pages.

And current criticism shows that these are occasionally making an appearance. When Sinclair Lewis began his poking at the ribs of American life, he created no definite characters. He was interested alone in showing his own revolt at the existence with which his characters were faced. But with "Arrow-Smith" came force, and he had made a living being. Dreiser's characters fade before the gloom of their background dos Passos' get lost in the subway jams of Times Square. But each has an occasional flicker of reality, of being, like mannikins in a show window they sometimes seem alive.

A through study of current fiction in America reveals more and more those moments of reality. As the individual writer learns to see beneath his scene into reality, into that play of forces from which springs character, a stride is made toward the Promised Land of a real American literature.

Western civilization, be it bathtubian or bunk, is a reality which necessarily had to be analyzed by fictionists before they could use it as a medium for classic expression. The time has now come when the analysis is no longer new, no longer prepotent. Indeed one can easily believe with such critics as Carl Van Doren here and J. C. Squire in England that a real dawn is illuminating the field of American letters.