And yet, I cannot end my story that way for Americans. There _must_ be
a grand moral revolt. There must be resistance, triumph, and not only
spiritual, but also financial recovery. And this, likewise, is
sentimentality. Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent "Turmoil," had
to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange
a practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a
commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at
the end of the book. A story such as the Danish Nexo's "Pelle the
Conqueror," where pathos and the idyllic, each intense, each
beautiful, are made convincing by an undeviating truth to experience,
would seem to be almost impossible of production just now in America.

It is not enough to rail at this false fiction. The chief duty of
criticism is to explain. The best corrective of bad writing is a
knowledge of why it is bad. We get the fiction we deserve,
precisely as we get the government we deserve--or perhaps, in each
case, a little better. Why are we sentimental? When that question
is answered, it is easier to understand the defects and the
virtues of American fiction. And the answer lies in the
traditional American philosophy of life.

To say that the American is an idealist is to commit a
thoroughgoing platitude. Like most platitudes, the statement is
annoying because from one point of view it is indisputably just,
while from another it does not seem to fit the facts. With regard
to our tradition, it is indisputable. Of the immigrants who since
the seventeenth century have been pouring into this continent a
proportion large in number, larger still in influence, has been
possessed of motives which in part at least were idealistic. If it
was not the desire for religious freedom that urged them, it was