comfortable, safe, and prosperous mode of living. Every one
succeeds in American plays and stories--if not by good thinking,
why then by good looks or good luck. A curious society the
research student of a later date might make of it--an upper world
of the colorless successful, illustrated by chance-saved collar
advertisements and magazine covers; an underworld of grotesque
scamps, clowns, and hyphenates drawn from the comic supplement;
and all--red-blooded hero and modern gargoyle alike--always in
good humor.

I am not touching in this picture merely to attack it. It has been
abundantly attacked; what it needs is definition. For there is
much in this bourgeois, good-humored American literature of ours
which rings true, which is as honest an expression of our
individuality as was the more austere product of antebellum New
England. If American sentimentality does invite criticism,
American sentiment deserves defense.

Sentiment--the response of the emotions to the appeal of human
nature--is cheap, but so are many other good things. The best of
the ancients were rich in it. Homer's chieftains wept easily. So
did Shakespeare's heroes. Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears"
when they left the Paradise which Milton imagined for them. A
heart accessible to pathos, to natural beauty, to religion, was a
chief requisite for the protagonist of Victorian literature. Even
Becky Sharp was touched--once--by Amelia's moving distress.

Americans, to be sure, do not weep easily; but if they make
equivalent responses to sentiment, that should not be held against
them. If we like "sweet" stories, or "strong"--which means