tic 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 this generation we believe, 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 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 ly in the public press.

especial

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.

III

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. One does not have to follow Freud and his school into their sexpathology in order to believe that. 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 a 'dry' town. We must look for psychological as well as economic and geographical causes for mental peculiarities exhibiting themselves in literature. No one can doubt the effect of the suppression by the 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, are nevertheless figured on a page whose superscription reads, '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 cosy 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 of world-war, we have placed, unwillingly, perhaps unconsciously, 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-hundrednight plays, and resort for inspiration to the English school of anti-Victorians: to Schnitzler with his brilliant Viennese cynicism; less commonly, because he is more subtle, 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. As a race we have too much sentiment to be frightened out of the sentimental by a blasé cynicism.

At first glance the flood of moral literature now upon us social-conscience stories, scientific plays, platitu

dinous '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 those '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. His world is predominantly moral; but his stories are not forged into machines contrived to hammer home neglected truth.

Not so with the writers of the socialconscience 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 exer

cise 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 suf fered 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.

The American sentimentalists, two million readers strong, are intrenched behind ramparts of indifference which no shrapnel fire of criticism or countermine of honest writing can ever destroy. We can take a trench or two, blow up some particularly obnoxious citadel, and trouble their security by exploding bombs of truth; but defeat must come finally from within their own lines.

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.

THE lieutenant stood out on the barrack-steps, in the shining dew of the morning. A sunrise grin illumined his face, and his heels eased rhythmically up from the plane as though his toes had springs in them. Cold water and soap and a fundamental grooming gleamed from every inch of his body. 'Did you sleep well?' I asked, by way of being preposterous.

'Sleep!' scoffed he, 'why, sleep's for breakfast! "Sleep for your breakfast, walk for your dinner, and you're a very poor soldier if you can't go to bed supperless." That's what my old grandmother used to tell me sister and daughter and mother of soldiers, and a sensible woman anyway. Look here! See our moon-flowers.'

Out in front of the barracks, in the midst of the grassplot, blooms a bed of roses. But the turf around the bed had suddenly developed a crop related to roses in no sense at all. There was an ancient tin pail. There was a rickety, old fishing-basket. There was a small, sharp-pronged iron trident, with a long handle made of fresh-cut hickory sapling still wearing its bark. And, finally, there was a brand-new and wholly anonymous fyke.

In the battered tin pail gasped a dark and slippery mass of suckers and catfish, disturbed occasionally by spasmodic motion. In the old basket lay other suckers, which would never move again. In the clear water of the concrete horse-trough, near by, other catfish, rescued in extremis by some sympathetic trooper, raced hither and yon

with fully restored energy. And then, the fyke!

A fyke is a thing invented when the god of the fishes was sleeping. Its mouth is broad and deep and deadly. Its body is a hopeless abyss. At intervals the body is distended by slender hoops, each with a deadly mouth of its own. And when its tail is weighted fast up-stream and its rapacious jaws yawn at its full length below, few are the fish that pass it safely by; nor does any that enters, small or great, return.

A fish's inferno at all seasons, there are times and places when and where the law of Pennsylvania also holds the fyke abhorrent. Section 4 of the Act of May 1, 1909, P.L. 353, reads:

'It shall be unlawful to use fyke nets... from the first day of June to the thirtieth day of June inclusive... nor shall such nets be used in any streams inhabited by trout, at any time of the year. .. Provided further,

...

that each fyke net . . . must have fastened thereon a metallic tag bearing the name and residence of the owner thereof. Any person violating any of the provisions in this section, shall, on conviction... be subject to a penalty of twenty dollars, together with the forfeiture of all boats, nets and other appliances used, to the Department of Fisheries.'

With another look at the collection on the grass, 'Come inside,' I begged, 'and tell me the story."

'Oh, but it's no story at all,' protested the lieutenant. 'We heard they