ation. A serious book by David Graham Phillips,
published serially in a popular monthly, is raided the moment it appears
between covers; a trashy piece of nastiness by Elinor Glyn goes
unmolested. Worse, books are sold for months and even years without
protest, and then suddenly attacked; Dreiser's "The 'Genius,'"
Kreymborg's "Edna" and Forel's "The Sexual Question" are examples. Still
worse, what is held to be unobjectionable in one State is forbidden in
another as _contra bonos mores_.[74] Altogether, there is madness, and
no method in it. The livelihoods and good names of hard-striving and
decent men are at the mercy of the whims of a horde of fanatics and
mountebanks, and they have no way of securing themselves against attack,
and no redress for their loss when it comes.

Sec. 6

So beset, it is no wonder that the typical American maker of books
becomes a timorous and ineffective fellow, whose work tends inevitably
toward a feeble superficiality. Sucking in the Puritan spirit with the
very air he breathes, and perhaps burdened inwardly with an inheritance
of the actual Puritan stupidity, he is further kept upon the straight
path of chemical purity by the very real perils that I have just
rehearsed. The result is a literature full of the mawkishness that the
late Henry James so often roared against--a literature almost wholly
detached from life as men are living it in the world--in George Moore's
phrase, a literature still at nurse. It is on the side of sex that the
appointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief repressions, for it is
sex that especially fascinates the lubricious Puritan mind; but the
conventual reticence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one field
extends itself to all others. Our fiction, in general, is marked by an
artificiality as marked as that of Eighteenth Century poetry or the
later Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set forms and stale
situations; the revelation, by such a book as "The Titan," that there
may be a glamour as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as in
the way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated and exotic. We have no
first-rate political or religious novel; we have no first-rate war
story; despite all our national engrossment in commercial enterprise, we
have few second-rate tales of business. Romance, in American fiction,
still means only a somewhat childish amorousness and sentimentality--the
love affairs of Paul and Virginia, or the pale adu