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.
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