Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism | Page 2

only by an occasional importation of an American
"best-seller." We have no bad eminence here. Sentimentalists with
enlarged hearts are international in habitat, although, it must be
admitted, especially popular in America.
When a critic, after a course in American novels and magazines,
declares that life, as it appears on the printed page here, is
fundamentally sentimentalized, he goes much deeper than "mushiness"
with his charge. He means, I think, that there is an alarming tendency in
American fiction to dodge the facts of life-- or to pervert them. He
means that in most popular books only red- blooded, optimistic people
are welcome. He means that material success, physical soundness, and
the gratification of the emotions have the right of way. He means that
men and women (except the comic figures) shall be presented, not as
they are, but as we should like to have them, according to a judgment
tempered by nothing more searching than our experience with an
unusually comfortable, safe, and prosperous mode of living. Every one
succeeds in American plays and stories--if not by good thinking, why
then by good looks or good luck. A curious society the research student

of a later date might make of it--an upper world of the colorless
successful, illustrated by chance-saved collar advertisements and
magazine covers; an underworld of grotesque scamps, clowns, and
hyphenates drawn from the comic supplement; and all--red-blooded
hero and modern gargoyle alike--always in good humor.
I am not touching in this picture merely to attack it. It has been
abundantly attacked; what it needs is definition. For there is much in
this bourgeois, good-humored American literature of ours which rings
true, which is as honest an expression of our individuality as was the
more austere product of antebellum New England. If American
sentimentality does invite criticism, American sentiment deserves
defense.
Sentiment--the response of the emotions to the appeal of human
nature--is cheap, but so are many other good things. The best of the
ancients were rich in it. Homer's chieftains wept easily. So did
Shakespeare's heroes. Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears" when
they left the Paradise which Milton imagined for them. A heart
accessible to pathos, to natural beauty, to religion, was a chief requisite
for the protagonist of Victorian literature. Even Becky Sharp was
touched--once--by Amelia's moving distress.
Americans, to be sure, do not weep easily; but if they make equivalent
responses to sentiment, that should not be held against them. If we like
"sweet" stories, or "strong"--which means emotional--stories, our taste
is not thereby proved to be hopeless, or our national character bad. It is
better to be creatures of even sentimental sentiment with the author of
"The Rosary," than to see the world only as it is portrayed by the pens
of Bernard Shaw and Anatole France. The first is deplorable; the
second is dangerous. I should deeply regret the day when a simple story
of honest American manhood winning a million and a sparkling,
piquant sweetheart lost all power to lull my critical faculty and warm
my heart. I doubt whether any literature has ever had too much of
honest sentiment.
Good Heavens! Because some among us insist that the mystic rose of
the emotions shall be painted a brighter pink than nature allows, are the
rest to forego glamour? Or because, to view the matter differently,
psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a man falls in
love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care for property rights,

are we to suspect the idyllic in literature wherever we find it? Life is
full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever persuade the
reasonably romantic youth that the sweet and chivalrous passion which
leads him to mingle reverence with desire for the object of his
affections, is nothing but an idealized property sense. Origins explain
very little, after all. The bilious critics of sentiment in literature have
not even honest science behind them.
I have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion--with such writers
as James Lane Allen and James Whitcomb Riley, for example. But the
average American is not content with such sentiment as theirs. He
wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be persuaded that, once
you step beyond your own experience, feeling rules the world. He
wishes--I judge by what he reads--to make sentiment at least ninety per
cent efficient, even if a dream- America, superficially resemblant to the
real, but far different in tone, must be created by the obedient writer in
order to satisfy him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimentalized
before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which he shares with other
modern races, he adds the other heinous sin of sentimentalism, the
refusal to face the facts.
This sentimentalizing of reality is far more dangerous than