A few are inherited intact by
the generation that follows, a few are passed on with slight
transformation, but most crumble or change into different versions
of the old half-truths. Among the most enduring of prejudices is
the fallacy of the good old times. Upon that formula nine-tenths
of the successful historical romances are built. That American
wives suffer from foreign husbands, that capital is ruthless, that
youth is right and age wrong, that energy wins over intellect,
that virtue is always rewarded, are American conceptions of some
endurance that have given short but lofty flights to thousands of
native stories.
More important, however, in the history of fiction are those wide
and slow moving currents of opinion, for which prejudice is
perhaps too narrow a name, which flow so imperceptibly through the
minds of a generation or a whole century that there is little
realization of their novelty. Such a slow-moving current was the
humanitarianism which found such vigorous expression in Dickens,
the belief in industrial democracy which is being picked up as a
theme by novelist after novelist to-day, or the sense of the value
of personality and human experience which so intensely
characterizes the literature of the early Renaissance.
Pages:
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93