A recent sincere and beautiful greeting from Mr. John Galsworthy to THE LITTLE REVIEW suggests that the creative artist and the creative critic in America may wisely heed a saying of de Maupassant about a writer "sitting down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it, seen it with the part of him which makes him This man and not That."
Mr. Galsworthy adds: "And I did seem to notice in America that there was a good deal of space and not much time; and that without too much danger of becoming 'Yogis,' people might perhaps sit down a little longer in front of things than they seemed to do."
What native observer of American writing will not welcome the justice of this comment? Surely the contemporary American poems, novels, tales, and critiques which express an individual and attentively-considered impression of any subject from our own life here are few: and these not, it would appear, greatly in vogue. Why? Everyone will have his own answer.
In replying to the first part of the question--why closely-considered individual impressions of our life are few--I think it should be said that the habit of respect for close attention of any kind is not among the American virtues. The visitor of our political conventions, the reader of our "literary criticism" must have noted a prevailing, shuffling, and perfunctory mood of casual disregard for the matter in hand. Many American people are indeed reared to suppose that if they appear to bestow an interested attention on the matter before them, some misunderstanding will ensue as to their own social importance. Nearly everyone must have noted with a sinking of the heart this attitude towards the public among library attendants, hotel-clerks, and plumbers. This abstraction is not, however, confined to the pursuers of any occupation, but to some degree affects us all. In the consciousness of our nation there appears to exist a mysterious though deep-seated awe for the prestige of the casual and the off-hand.
Especially we think it an unworthiness in an author that he should, as the phrase is, "take himself seriously." We consider the attitude we have described as characterizing library attendants and hotel-clerks as the only correct one for writers--the attitude of a person doing something as it were unconsciously, a matter he pooh-poohs and scarcely cares to expend his energy and time upon in the grand course of his personal existence. You may hear plenty of American authors talk of "not taking themselves seriously" who, if they spoke with accuracy, should say that they regarded themselves as too important and precious to exhaust themselves by doing their work with conscience.