"Be true--be true!" as well as
in his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest romancer was
typical of the imaginative literature of his countrymen. The restless
artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly
and terrifying aspect of illness and decay, and distorted by all
passions save one. His imagination was singularly sexless. Pathological
students have pointed out the relation between this characteristic of
Poe's writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating,
alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But no such explanation is at hand to
elucidate the absence of sexual passion from the novels of the
masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One may say, indeed, that Cooper's
novels, like Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that their
tone is consonant with the views of a sound Church of England parson in
the eighteenth century; and that the absence of physical passion, like
the absence of purely spiritual insight, betrays a certain defect in
Cooper's imaginative grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after
all, to remember that these three pioneers in American fiction-writing
were composing for an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes
were predominant. Not one of the three men but would have instantly
sacrificed an artistic effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or
Goethe or Balzac, rather than--in the phrase so often satirized--"bring
a blush to the cheek of innocence." In other words, the presence of a
specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic
restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our
imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers.
That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such
full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray--a reticence which men like
Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical
and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their
utmost to abolish--has hitherto dominated our American writing. The
contemporary influence of great Continental writers to whom reticence
is unknown, combined with the influence of a contemporary opera and
drama to which reticence would be unprofitable, are now assaulting this
dominant convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But it is only within
recent years that its rule has been questioned.

One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted. While very few
writers of eminence, after all, in any country,