Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism | Page 6

As a race we have too much sentiment to be frightened out of the
sentimental by a blase cynicism.
At first glance the flood of moral literature now upon us--social-
conscience stories, scientific plays, platitudinous "moralities" that tell
us how to live--may seem to be another protest against sentimentalism.
And that the French and English examples have been so warmly
welcomed here may seem another indication of a reaction on our part. I
refer especially to "hard" stories, full of vengeful wrath, full of
warnings for the race that dodges the facts of life. H. G. Wells is the
great exemplar, with his sociological studies wrapped in description
and tied with a plot. In a sense, such stories are certainly to be regarded
as a protest against truth-dodging, against cheap optimism, against
"slacking," whether in literature or in life. But it would be equally just
to call them another result of suppressed idealism, and to regard their
popularity in America as proof of the argument which I have advanced
in this essay. Excessively didactic literature is often a little unhealthy.
In fresh periods, when life runs strong and both ideals and passions find
ready issue into life, literature has no burdensome moral to carry. It
digests its moral. Homer digested his morals. They transfuse his epics.
So did Shakespeare.
Not so with the writers of the social-conscience school. They are in a
rage over wicked, wasteful man. Their novels are bursted
notebooks--sometimes neat and orderly notebooks, like Mr.
Galsworthy's or our own Ernest Poole's, sometimes haphazard ones,
like those of Mr. Wells, but always explosive with reform. These

gentlemen know very well what they are about, especially Mr. Wells,
the lesser artist, perhaps, as compared with Galsworthy, but the
shrewder and possibly the greater man. The very sentimentalists, who
go to novels to exercise the idealism which they cannot use in life, will
read these unsentimental stories, although their lazy impulses would
never spur them on toward any truth not sweetened by a tale.
And yet, one feels that the social attack might have been more
convincing if free from its compulsory service to fiction; that these
novels and plays might have been better literature if the authors did not
study life in order that they might be better able to preach. Wells and
Galsworthy also have suffered from suppressed idealism, although it
would be unfair to say that perversion was the result. So have our
muck-rakers, who, very characteristically, exhibit the disorder in a
more complex and a much more serious form, since to a distortion of
facts they have often enough added hypocrisy and commercialism. It is
part of the price we pay for being sentimental.
If I am correct in my analysis, we are suffering here in America, not
from a plague of bad taste merely, nor only from a lack of real
education among our myriads of readers, nor from decadence-- least of
all, this last. It is a disease of our own particular virtue which has
infected us--idealism, suppressed and perverted. A less commercial,
more responsible America, perhaps a less prosperous and more spiritual
America, will hold fast to its sentiment, but be weaned from its
sentimentality.

FREE FICTION
What impresses me most in the contemporary short story as I find it in
American magazines, is its curious sophistication. Its bloom is gone. I
have read through dozens of periodicals without finding one with fresh
feeling and the easy touch of the writer who writes because his story
urges him. And when with relief I do encounter a narrative that is not
conventional in structure and mechanical in its effects, the name of the
author is almost invariably that of a newcomer, or of one of our few
uncorrupted masters of the art. Still more remarkable, the good short
stories that I meet with in my reading are the trivial ones,--the sketchy,
the anecdotal, the merely adventurous or merely picturesque; as they
mount toward literature they seem to increase in artificiality and

constraint; when they propose to interpret life they become machines,
and nothing more, for the discharge of sensation, sentiment, or romance.
And this is true, so far as I can discover, of the stories which most
critics and more editors believe to be successful, the stories which are
most characteristic of magazine narrative and of the output of
American fiction in our times.
I can take my text from any magazine, from the most literary to the
least. In the stories selected by all of them I find the resemblances
greater than the differences, and the latter seldom amount to more than
a greater or a less excellence of workmanship and style. The "literary"
magazines, it is true, more frequently surprise one by a story told with
original and consummate art; but then the