Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism | Page 5

Puritan discipline of that instinctive love of
pleasure and liberal experience common to us all. Its unhealthy reaction
is visible in every old American community. No one who faces the
facts can deny the result of the suppression by commercial, bourgeois,
prosperous America of our native idealism. The student of society may
find its dire effects in politics, in religion, and in social intercourse. The
critic cannot overlook them in literature; for it is in the realm of the
imagination that idealism, direct or perverted, does its best or its worst.
Sentiment is not perverted idealism. Sentiment is idealism, of a mild
and not too masculine variety. If it has sins, they are sins of omission,
not commission. Our fondness for sentiment proves that our idealism, if
a little loose in the waist-band and puffy in the cheeks, is still hearty,
still capable of active mobilization, like those comfortable French
husbands whose plump and smiling faces, careless of glory, careless of
everything but thrift and good living, one used to see figured on a page
whose superscription read, "Dead on the field of honor."
The novels, the plays, the short stories, of sentiment may prefer
sweetness, perhaps, to truth, the feminine to the masculine virtues, but
we waste ammunition in attacking them. There never was, I suppose, a
great literature of sentiment, for not even "The Sentimental Journey" is
truly great. But no one can make a diet exclusively of "noble" literature;
the charming has its own cozy corner across from the tragic (and a
much bigger corner at that). Our uncounted amorists of tail-piece song

and illustrated story provide the readiest means of escape from the
somewhat uninspiring life that most men and women are living just
now in America.
The sentimental, however,--whether because of an excess of sentiment
softening into "slush," or of a morbid optimism, or of a weak-eyed
distortion of the facts of life,--is perverted. It needs to be cured, and its
cure is more truth. But this cure, I very much fear, is not entirely, or
even chiefly, in the power of the "regular practitioner," the honest
writer. He can be honest; but if he is much more honest than his readers,
they will not read him. As Professor Lounsbury once said, a language
grows corrupt only when its speakers grow corrupt, and mends,
strengthens, and becomes pure with them. So with literature. We shall
have less sentimentality in American literature when our accumulated
store of idealism disappears in a laxer generation; or when it finds due
vent in a more responsible, less narrow, less monotonously prosperous
life than is lived by the average reader of fiction in America. I would
rather see our literary taste damned forever than have the first
alternative become--as it has not yet--a fact. The second, in these years
rests upon the knees of the gods.
All this must not be taken in too absolute a sense. There are medicines,
and good ones, in the hands of writers and of critics, to abate, if not to
heal, this plague of sentimentalism. I have stated ultimate causes only.
They are enough to keep the mass of Americans reading
sentimentalized fiction until some fundamental change has come, not
strong enough to hold back the van of American writing, which is
steadily moving toward restraint, sanity, and truth. Every honest
composition is a step forward in the cause; and every clear-minded
criticism.
But one must doubt the efficacy, and one must doubt the healthiness, of
reaction into cynicism and sophisticated cleverness. There are curious
signs, especially in what we may call the literature of New York, of a
growing sophistication that sneers at sentiment and the sentimental
alike. "Magazines of cleverness" have this for their keynote, although
as yet the satire is not always well aimed. There are abundant signs that
the generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a pose. It is
observable now in the colleges, where the young literati turn up their
noses at everything American,--magazines, best-sellers, or

one-hundred-night plays,--and resort for inspiration to the English
school of anti-Victorians: to Remy de Gourmont, to Anatole France.
Their pose is not altogether to be blamed, and the men to whom they
resort are models of much that is admirable; but there is little promise
for American literature in exotic imitation. To see ourselves
prevailingly as others see us may be good for modesty, but does not
lead to a self-confident native art. And it is a dangerous way for
Americans to travel. We cannot afford such sophistication yet. The
English wits experimented with cynicism in the court of Charles II,
laughed at blundering Puritan morality, laughed at country manners,
and were whiffed away because the ideals they laughed at were better
than their own. Idealism is not funny, however censurable its excesses.