if he is much more honest than his readers, they will not read
him. As Professor Lounsbury once said, a language grows corrupt
only when its speakers grow corrupt, and mends, strengthens, and
becomes pure with them. So with literature. We shall have less
sentimentality in American literature when our accumulated store
of idealism disappears in a laxer generation; or when it finds due
vent in a more responsible, less narrow, less monotonously
prosperous life than is lived by the average reader of fiction in
America. I would rather see our literary taste damned forever than
have the first alternative become--as it has not yet--a fact. The
second, in these years rests upon the knees of the gods.

All this must not be taken in too absolute a sense. There are
medicines, and good ones, in the hands of writers and of critics,
to abate, if not to heal, this plague of sentimentalism. I have
stated ultimate causes only. They are enough to keep the mass of
Americans reading sentimentalized fiction until some fundamental
change has come, not strong enough to hold back the van of
American writing, which is steadily moving toward restraint,
sanity, and truth. Every honest composition is a step forward in
the cause; and every clear-minded criticism.

But one must doubt the efficacy, and one must doubt the
healthiness, of reaction into cynicism and sophisticated
cleverness. There are curious signs, especially in what we may
call the literature of New York, of a growing sophistication that
sneers at sentiment and the sentimental alike. "Magazines of
cleverness" have this for their keynote, although as yet the
satire is not always well aimed. There are abundant signs that the
generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a pose. It is