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.