Origins explain very little,
after all. The bilious critics of sentiment in literature have not
even honest science behind them.
I have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion--with such
writers as James Lane Allen and James Whitcomb Riley, for example.
But the average American is not content with such sentiment as
theirs. He wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be
persuaded that, once you step beyond your own experience, feeling
rules the world. He wishes--I judge by what he reads--to make
sentiment at least ninety per cent efficient, even if a dream-
America, superficially resemblant to the real, but far different
in tone, must be created by the obedient writer in order to
satisfy him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimentalized
before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which he shares with
other modern races, he adds the other heinous sin of
sentimentalism, the refusal to face the facts.
This sentimentalizing of reality is far more dangerous than 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.
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