--the adjectives that every casual European applies to us,--and yet
any book-store window or railway news-stand will show that we
prefer sentimental magazines and books. Why should a hard race--if
we are hard--read soft books?

By soft books, by sentimental books, I do not mean only the kind
of literature best described by the word "squashy." I doubt
whether we write or read more novels and short stories of the
tear-dripped or hyper-emotional variety than other nations.
Germany is--or was--full of such soft stuff. It is highly popular
in France, although the excellent taste of French criticism keeps
it in check. Italian popular literature exudes sentiment; and the
sale of "squashy" fiction in England is said to be threatened only
by an occasional importation of an American "best-seller." We have
no bad eminence here. Sentimentalists with enlarged hearts are
international in habitat, although, it must be admitted,
especially popular in America.

When a critic, after a course in American novels and magazines,
declares that life, as it appears on the printed page here, is
fundamentally sentimentalized, he goes much deeper than
"mushiness" with his charge. He means, I think, that there is an
alarming tendency in American fiction to dodge the facts of life--
or to pervert them. He means that in most popular books only red-
blooded, optimistic people are welcome. He means that material
success, physical soundness, and the gratification of the emotions
have the right of way. He means that men and women (except the
comic figures) shall be presented, not as they are, but as we
should like to have them, according to a judgment tempered by
nothing more searching than our experience with an unusually