Critic Sherman
As it must to all men, Death came to Stuart Pratt Sherman, 44, sometime professor of English literature, since 1924 editor of Books, the literary supplement of the New York Herald-Tribune. With Mrs. Sherman, he was canoeing off Manistee, Mich., and failed to swim ashore with her when capsized. Apparent cause: heart attack. Literary critics axe few in the U. S. Cultivation of the critical attitude against a background of letters, and its regular exercise for the promotion of better writing and the edification of the public, is practiced professionally by a scanty corporal's guard. Critic Sherman was eminently of this group, despite the fact that much of his work was laden with a heavy ego. He lacked the quiet clarity of Dr. Henry Seidel Canby of the Saturday Review. He was an lowan, with the midlander's tendency to lunge into emotional appreciations. Sparkle was not in him, as it is in that erudite, free-lancing Irishman, Ernest Boyd. His opinions savored strongly of the pundit, even after he dropped the P. from his signature and wrote more as a journalist than as a professor at the University of Illinois. And this was a ponderous pundit, not an explosive, like "the diabolical little boy with a bean-shooter," H. L. Mencken. But the ponderousness was the weight of great sincerity; in controversy it would give place to trenchant power as when a big-boned man rolls up his sleeves to fight. His subtlety and strength were in expressing the homelier virtues and pleasures of mankind. He had a feeling for tools, horses, unmistakably American landscapes, Whitmanesque humanities. He would write a word like "roots" or "bones" as though it were thrusting out of his nature to the very depth of his discussion. He was an unabashed moralist, some said Puritan, but seldom to the neglect of art's due. Now there are left, besides the Messers. Canby, Boyd and Mencken, Critics Carl and Mark Van Doren, Burton Rascoe, Louis Untermeyer (poetry), Ludwig Lewisohn, Joseph Wood Krutch. There is unique, felicitous Dr. William Lyons Phelps. There are notable book conmentators and appreciators; John Farrar (The Bookman), Mary Colum, Isabel Patterson, Grant Overton, Harry Hansen (vice gusty Lawrence Stallings on the N. Y. World), George Sterling (San Francisco), William Allen White, Heywood Broun, Allan Nevins. And there are many creative writers whose discussion of one another's work stands for much that is good in U. S. criticism—William McFee, Christopher Morley, Thomas Beer, Louis Bromfield, Elmer Davis, John Erskine, Dorothy Canfield.
Hill Woman