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.
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