call them another result of suppressed idealism, and to regard
their popularity in America as proof of the argument which I have
advanced in this essay. Excessively didactic literature is often a
little unhealthy. In fresh periods, when life runs strong and both
ideals and passions find ready issue into life, literature has no
burdensome moral to carry. It digests its moral. Homer digested
his morals. They transfuse his epics. So did Shakespeare.

Not so with the writers of the social-conscience school. They are
in a rage over wicked, wasteful man. Their novels are bursted
notebooks--sometimes neat and orderly notebooks, like Mr.
Galsworthy's or our own Ernest Poole's, sometimes haphazard ones,
like those of Mr. Wells, but always explosive with reform. These
gentlemen know very well what they are about, especially Mr.
Wells, the lesser artist, perhaps, as compared with Galsworthy,
but the shrewder and possibly the greater man. The very
sentimentalists, who go to novels to exercise the idealism which
they cannot use in life, will read these unsentimental stories,
although their lazy impulses would never spur them on toward any
truth not sweetened by a tale.

And yet, one feels that the social attack might have been more
convincing if free from its compulsory service to fiction; that
these novels and plays might have been better literature if the
authors did not study life in order that they might be better able
to preach. Wells and Galsworthy also have suffered from suppressed
idealism, although it would be unfair to say that perversion was
the result. So have our muck-rakers, who, very characteristically,
exhibit the disorder in a more complex and a much more serious
form, since to a distortion of facts they have often enough added