Note 45 — Chapter VIII · Sherwood Anderson on This Side of Freud

L’énergie américaine, l’énergie anglo-saxonne, such was for the last half a century the slogan of almost all the French travelers to the United States. Did not a French consul write, a few years before the War, a book called “La supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” based on the same views? These critics knew only the surface of city life in America. They ignored Winesburg and, of course, had not read Sherwood Anderson. Decadence or, as Max Nordau called it in a sensational book “Degeneracy,” has become a current topic in the books of the younger American writers. Most of them could be inscribed with George Cabot Lodge’s saying that: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third rate.” Such a statement certainly calls for a serious qualification but it may prove useful as a “damper” against the professional panegyrists abroad and the megalomaniacs at home.