emotional--stories, our taste is not thereby proved to be
hopeless, or our national character bad. It is better to be
creatures of even sentimental sentiment with the author of "The
Rosary," than to see the world _only_ as it is portrayed by the pens
of Bernard Shaw and Anatole France. The first is deplorable; the
second is dangerous. I should deeply regret the day when a simple
story of honest American manhood winning a million and a sparkling,
piquant sweetheart lost all power to lull my critical faculty and warm
my heart. I doubt whether any literature has ever had too much of
honest sentiment.

Good Heavens! Because some among us insist that the mystic rose of
the emotions shall be painted a brighter pink than nature allows,
are the rest to forego glamour? Or because, to view the matter
differently, psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a
man falls in love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care
for property rights, are we to suspect the idyllic in literature
wherever we find it? Life is full of the idyllic; and no
anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth
that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle
reverence with desire for the object of his affections, is nothing
but an idealized property sense. Origins explain very little,
after all. The bilious critics of sentiment in literature have not
even honest science behind them.

I have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion--with such
writers as James Lane Allen and James Whitcomb Riley, for example.
But the average American is not content with such sentiment as
theirs. He wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be
persuaded that, once you step beyond your own experience, feeling