Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism | Page 3

the romantic
sentimentalizing of the "squashy" variety. It is to be found in
sex-stories which carefully observe decency of word and deed, where
the conclusion is always in accord with conventional morality, yet
whose characters are clearly immoral, indecent, and would so display
themselves if the tale were truly told. It is to be found in stories of "big
business" where trickery and rascality are made virtuous at the end by
sentimental baptism. If I choose for the hero of my novel a director in
an American trust; if I make him an accomplice in certain acts of
ruthless economic tyranny; if I make it clear that at first he is merely
subservient to a stronger will; and that the acts he approves are in
complete disaccord with his private moral code--why then, if the facts
should be dragged to the light, if he is made to realize the exact nature
of his career, how can I end my story? It is evident that my hero
possesses little insight and less firmness of character. He is not a hero;
he is merely a tool. In, let us say, eight cases out of ten, his curve is
already plotted. It leads downward--not necessarily along the villain's
path, but toward moral insignificance.

And yet, I cannot end my story that way for Americans. There must be
a grand moral revolt. There must be resistance, triumph, and not only
spiritual, but also financial recovery. And this, likewise, is
sentimentality. Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent "Turmoil," had
to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange a
practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a
commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at the
end of the book. A story such as the Danish Nexo's "Pelle the
Conqueror," where pathos and the idyllic, each intense, each beautiful,
are made convincing by an undeviating truth to experience, would seem
to be almost impossible of production just now in America.
It is not enough to rail at this false fiction. The chief duty of criticism is
to explain. The best corrective of bad writing is a knowledge of why it
is bad. We get the fiction we deserve, precisely as we get the
government we deserve--or perhaps, in each case, a little better. Why
are we sentimental? When that question is answered, it is easier to
understand the defects and the virtues of American fiction. And the
answer lies in the traditional American philosophy of life.
To say that the American is an idealist is to commit a thoroughgoing
platitude. Like most platitudes, the statement is annoying because from
one point of view it is indisputably just, while from another it does not
seem to fit the facts. With regard to our tradition, it is indisputable. Of
the immigrants who since the seventeenth century have been pouring
into this continent a proportion large in number, larger still in influence,
has been possessed of motives which in part at least were idealistic. If it
was not the desire for religious freedom that urged them, it was the
desire for personal freedom; if not political liberty, why then economic
liberty (for this too is idealism), and the opportunity to raise the
standard of life. And of course all these motives were strongest in that
earlier immigration which has done most to fix the state of mind and
body which we call being American. I need not labor the argument.
Our political and social history support it; our best literature
demonstrates it, for no men have been more idealistic than the
American writers whom we have consented to call great. Emerson,
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman--was idealism ever more thoroughly
incarnate than in them?
And this idealism--to risk again a platitude--has been in the air of

America. It has permeated our religious sects, and created several of
them. It has given tone to our thinking, and even more to our feeling. I
do not say that it has always, or even usually, determined our actions,
although the Civil War is proof of its power. Again and again it has
gone aground roughly when the ideal met a condition of living--a fact
that will provide the explanation for which I seek. But optimism,
"boosting," muck- raking (not all of its manifestations are pretty),
social service, religious, municipal, democratic reform, indeed the
"uplift" generally, is evidence of the vigor, the bumptiousness of the
inherited American tendency to pursue the ideal. No one can doubt that
in 1918 we believed, at least, in idealism. Nevertheless, so far as the
average individual is concerned, with just his share and no more of the
race-tendency, this idealism has been suppressed, and in some measure
perverted. It is this which explains, I think, American sentimentalism.
Consider, for example, the ethics