would be seriously compromised" by an avowal. Six years later Frank
Norris shook up the Phelpses and Mores of the time with "McTeague."
Since then there have been assaults timorous and assaults head-long--by
Bierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by Fuller--by Mary MacLanes and by
Upton Sinclairs--by ploughboy poets from the Middle West and by jitney
geniuses in Greenwich Village--assaults gradually tapering off to a mere
sophomoric brashness and deviltry. And all of them like snow-ballings of
Verdun. All of them petered out and ineffectual. The normal, the typical
American book of today is as fully a remouthing of old husks as the
normal book of Griswold's day. The whole atmosphere of our literature,
in William James' phrase, is "mawkish and dishwatery." Books are still
judged among us, not by their form and organization as works of art,
their accuracy and vividness as representations of life, their validity
and perspicacity as interpretations of it, but by their conformity to
the national prejudices, their accordance with set standards of niceness
and propriety. The thing irrevocably demanded is a "sane" book; the
ideal is a "clean," an "inspiring," a "glad" book.

Sec. 3

All this may be called the Puritan impulse from within. It is, indeed,
but a single manifestation of one of the deepest prejudices of a
religious and half-cultured people--the prejudice against beauty as a
form of debauchery and corruption--the distrust of all ideas that do not
fit readily into certain accepted axioms--the belief in the eternal
validity of moral concepts--in brief, the whole mental sluggishness of
the lower orders of men. But in addition to this internal resistance,
there has been laid upon American letters the heavy hand of a Puritan
authority from without, and no examination of the history and present
condition of our literature could be of any value which did not take it
constantly into account, and work out the means of its influence and
operation. That authority, as I shall show, transcends both in power and
in alertness the natural reactions of the national mind, and is
incomparably more potent in combating ideas. It is supported by a body
of law that is unmatched in any other country of Christendom, and it is
exercised with a fanatical harshness and vigilance that make escape from
its operations well nigh impossible. Some of its effects, both direct
and indirect, I shall describe later, but before doing so it may be well
to tra