Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) by Carl Van Doren
page 59 of 146 (40%)
page 59 of 146 (40%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has
himself, as his personal history in _The Brass Check_ makes clear enough, been practically conspired against. But some instinct for melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention. In _Love's Pilgrimage_, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself heard. In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant genius down. Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but those who are straining at a similar leash. So also in _The Profits of Religion_--which is to the present age what _The Age of Reason_ was to an earlier revolutionary generation--Mr. Sinclair excessively simplifies religious history by reducing almost the whole process to a conspiracy on the part of priestcraft to hoodwink the people and so to fatten its own greedy purse. He must know that the process has not been quite so simple; but, leaving to others to say the things that all will say, he studies "supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to privilege." Here again his instincts and methods as a melodramatist assert themselves: he warms to the struggle and plays his lash upon his conspiring priests in a mood of mingled duty and delight. |
|