This is a very different kind of truth-telling from, let us say,
Mrs. Wharton's in "The Age of Innocence" or Zona Gale's in "Miss
Lulu Bett." It does not spring from a desire to tell the truth
about human nature.
These asserters of youth are not much interested in any human
nature except their own, not much, indeed, in that, but only in
the friction between their ego and the world. It is passionate
truth, which is very different from cool truth; it is subjective,
not objective; romantic, not classical, to use the old terms which
few nowadays except Professor Babbitt's readers understand. Nor is
it the truth that Wells, let us say, or, to use a greater name,
Tolstoy was seeking. It is not didactic or even interpretative,
but only the truth about the difference between the world as it is
and the world as it was expected to be; an impressionistic truth;
in fact, the truth about _my_ experiences, which is very different
from what I may sometime think to be the truth about mankind.
It will be strange if nothing very good comes from this impulse,
for the purpose to "tell the world" that my vision of America is
startlingly different from what I have read about America is
identical with that break with the past which has again and again
been prelude to a new era.
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