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.
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