Francisco and New
Orleans,--the prevailing American view of the world and its mysteries is
still a moral one, and no other human concern gets half the attention
that is endlessly lavished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of
the other fellow. It needed no official announcement to define the
function and office of the republic as that of an international expert
in morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the more backward nations.
Within, as well as without, the eternal rapping of knuckles and
proclaiming of new austerities goes on. The American, save in moments of
conscious and swiftly lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values,
including even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. He is
beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he believes firmly that
there is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes its
operation with a fanatical vigilance.

Naturally enough, this moral obsession has given a strong colour to
American literature. In truth, it has coloured it so brilliantly that
American literature is set off sharply from all other literatures. In
none other will you find so wholesale and ecstatic a sacrifice of
aesthetic ideas, of all the fine gusto of passion and beauty, to notions
of what is meet, proper and nice. From the books of grisly sermons that
were the first American contribution to letters down to that amazing
literature of "inspiration" which now flowers so prodigiously, with two
literary ex-Presidents among its chief virtuosi, one observes no
relaxation of the moral pressure. In the history of every other
literature there have been periods of what might be called moral
innocence--periods in which a naif _joie de vivre_ has broken through
all concepts of duty and responsibility, and the wonder and glory of the
universe have been hymned with unashamed zest. The age of Shakespeare
comes to mind at once: the violence of the Puritan reaction offers a
measure of the pendulum's wild swing. But in America no such general
rising of the blood has ever been seen. The literature of the nation,
even the literature of the enlightened minority, has been under harsh
Puritan restraints from the beginning, and despite a few stealthy
efforts at revolt--usually quite without artistic value or even common
honesty, as in the case of the cheap fiction magazines and that of
smutty plays on Broadway, and always very short-lived--it shows not the
slightest sign of emancipating itself t