are
carried on _in vacuo_; his discoveries are not expressed in terms of
passion, but in terms of giggles.

In the followers of Howells and James one finds little save an empty
imitation of their emptiness, a somewhat puerile parodying of their
highly artful but essentially personal technique. To wade through the
books of such characteristic American fictioneers as Frances Hodgson
Burnett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice Brown, James
Lane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton and
Sarah Orne Jewett is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible.
The flow of words is completely purged of ideas; in place of them one
finds no more than a romantic restatement of all the old platitudes and
formulae. To call such an emission of graceful poppycock a literature,
of course, is to mouth an absurdity, and yet, if the college professors
who write treatises on letters are to be believed, it is the best we
have to show. Turn, for example, to "A History of American Literature
Since 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee, one of the latest and
undoubtedly one of the least unintelligent of these books. In it the
gifted pedagogue gives extended notice to no less than six of the nine
writers I have mentioned, and upon all of them his verdicts are
flattering. He bestows high praises, direct and indirect, upon Mrs.
Freeman's "grim and austere" manner, her "repression," her entire lack
of poetical illumination. He compares Miss Jewett to both Howells and
Hawthorne, not to mention Mrs. Gaskell--and Addison! He grows
enthusiastic over a hollow piece of fine writing by Miss Brown. And he
forgets altogether to mention Dreiser, or Sinclair, or Medill Patterson,
or Harry Leon Wilson, or George Ade!...

So much for the best. The worst is beyond description. France has her
Brieux and her Henry Bordeaux; Germany has her Muehlbach, her stars of
the _Gartenlaube_; England contributes Caine, Corelli, Oppenheim and
company. But it is in our country alone that banality in letters takes
on the proportions of a national movement; it is only here that a work
of the imagination is habitually judged by its sheer emptiness of ideas,
its fundamental platitudinousness, its correspondence with the
imbecility of mob thinking; it is only here that "glad" books run up
sales of hundreds of thousands. Richard Harding Davis, with his ideals
of a floor-walker; Gene Stratton-Porter, with her snuffling
sentimentality; Robert W. Cham