Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 190, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 August 1917 — Tradition and Good Books. [ARTICLE]

Tradition and Good Books.

Good books, like well-built houses, must have tradition behind them. The Homers and Shakespeares and Goethes spring from rich soil left by dead centuries; they are like native trees that grow so well nowhere else, says Henry Seidel Canby in the Yale Review. The little writers —hacks who sentimentalize to the latest order, and display their plot novelties like bargains on an advertising page—are just as traditional. The only difference is that their tradition goes back to books instead of life. Middle-sized authors — the very good and the probably enduring—are successful largely because they have gripped a tradition and followed it through to contemporary life. This is what Thackeray did in “Vanity Fair,” Howells in “The. Rise of Silas Lapham,” and Mrs. Wharton in “The House of Mirth.” But back-to-nature books —both the sound ones and those shameless exposures of the private emotions of groundhogs and turtles that call themselves nature books — are the most traditional of all, for they plunge directly into what might be called the adventures of the American sub-conscious.