Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism | Page 4

of conventional American society.
The American ethical tradition is perfectly definite and tremendously
powerful. It belongs, furthermore, to a population far larger than the
"old American" stock, for it has been laboriously inculcated in our
schools and churches, and impressively driven home by newspaper,
magazine, and book. I shall not presume to analyze it save where it
touches literature. There it maintains a definite attitude toward all
sex-problems: the Victorian, which is not necessarily, or even probably,
a bad one. Man should be chaste, and proud of his chastity. Woman
must be so. It is the ethical duty of the American to hate, or at least to
despise, all deviations, and to pretend--for the greater prestige of the
law--that such sinning is exceptional, at least in America. And this is
the public morality he believes in, whatever may be his private
experience in actual living. In business, it is the ethical tradition of the
American, inherited from a rigorous Protestant morality, to be square,
to play the game without trickery, to fight hard but never meanly.
Over-reaching is justifiable when the other fellow has equal
opportunities to be "smart"; lying, tyranny--never. And though the
opposites of all these laudable practices come to pass, he must frown
on them in public, deny their rightness even to the last cock-crow--
especially in the public press.
American political history is a long record of idealistic tendencies
toward democracy working painfully through a net of graft, pettiness,

sectionalism, and bravado, with constant disappointment for the idealist
who believes, traditionally, in the intelligence of the crowd. American
social history is a glaring instance of how the theory of equal dignity
for all men can entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and the
power of wealth. American economic history betrays the pioneer
helping to kick down the ladder which he himself had raised toward
equal opportunity for all. American literary history--especially
contemporary literary history--reflects the result of all this for the
American mind. The sentimental in our literature is a direct
consequence.
The disease is easily acquired. Mr. Smith, a broker, finds himself in an
environment of "schemes" and "deals" in which the quality of mercy is
strained, and the wind is decidedly not tempered to the shorn lamb.
After all, business is business. He shrugs his shoulders and takes his
part. But his unexpended fund of native idealism--if, as is most
probable, he has his share--seeks its due satisfaction. He cannot use it
in business; so he takes it out in a novel or a play where, quite contrary
to his observed experience, ordinary people like himself act nobly, with
a success that is all the more agreeable for being unexpected. His wife,
a woman with strange stirrings about her heart, with motions toward
beauty, and desires for a significant life and rich, satisfying experience,
exists in day-long pettiness, gossips, frivols, scolds, with money
enough to do what she pleases, and nothing vital to do. She also
relieves her pent-up idealism in plays or books--in high-wrought,
"strong" novels, not in adventures in society such as the kitchen
admires, but in stories with violent moral and emotional crises, whose
characters, no matter how unlifelike, have "strong" thoughts, and make
vital decisions; succeed or fail significantly. Her brother, the head of a
wholesale dry-goods firm, listens to the stories the drummers bring
home of night life on the road, laughs, says to himself regretfully that
the world has to be like that; and then, in logical reaction, demands
purity and nothing but aggressive purity in the books of the public
library.
The hard man goes in for philanthropy (never before so frequently as in
America); the one-time "boss" takes to picture-collecting; the railroad
wrecker gathers rare editions of the Bible; and tens of thousands of
humbler Americans carry their inherited idealism into the necessarily

sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly organized country, suppress
it for fear of being thought "cranky" or "soft," and then, in their
imagination and all that feeds their imagination, give it vent. You may
watch the process any evening at the "movies" or the melodrama, on
the trolley-car or in the easy chair at home.
This philosophy of living which I have called American idealism is in
its own nature sound, as is proved in a hundred directions where it has
had full play. Suppressed idealism, like any other suppressed desire,
becomes unsound. And here lies the ultimate cause of the taste for
sentimentalism in the American _bourgeoisie._ An undue insistence
upon happy endings, regardless of the premises of the story, and a
craving for optimism everywhere, anyhow, are sure signs of a "morbid
complex," and to be compared with some justice to the craving for
drugs in an alcoholic deprived of liquor. No one can doubt the effect of
the suppression by the