oday. The American, try as he
will, can never imagine any work of the imagination as wholly devoid of
moral content. It must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be
suspect and abominable.

If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical articles in
the newspapers and literary weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs
in a month's explorations to convince you forever. A novel or a play is
judged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty,
its perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its orthodoxy of
doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract. A
digest of the reviews of such a book as David Graham Phillips' "Susan
Lenox" or of such a play as Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" would make astounding
reading for a Continental European. Not only the childish incompetents
who write for the daily press, but also most of our critics of
experience and reputation, seem quite unable to estimate a piece of
writing as a piece of writing, a work of art as a work of art; they
almost inevitably drag in irrelevant gabble as to whether this or that
personage in it is respectable, or this or that situation in accordance
with the national notions of what is edifying and nice. Fully
nine-tenths of the reviews of Dreiser's "The Titan," without question
the best American novel of its year, were devoted chiefly to indignant
denunciations of the morals of Frank Cowperwood, its central character.
That the man was superbly imagined and magnificently depicted, that he
stood out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life, that his
creation was an artistic achievement of a very high and difficult
order--these facts seem to have made no impression upon the reviewers
whatever. They were Puritans writing for Puritans, and all they could
see in Cowperwood was an anti-Puritan, and in his creator another. It
will remain for Europeans, I daresay, to discover the true stature of
"The Titan," as it remained for Europeans to discover the true stature
of "Sister Carrie."

Just how deeply this corrective knife has cut you may find plainly
displayed in Dr. Kellner's little book. He sees the throttling influence
of an ever alert and bellicose Puritanism, not only in our grand
literature, but also in our petit literature, our minor poetry, even in
our humour. The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of
all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his
unbreak