Run the roll: Maeterlinck and his
languishing supernaturalism, Tagore and his Asiatic wind music, Selma
Lagerloef and her old maid's mooniness, Bernstein, Molnar and company and
their out-worn tricks--but I pile up no more names. Consider one fact:
the civilization that kissed Maeterlinck on both cheeks, and Tagore
perhaps even more intimately, has yet to shake hands with Anatole
France....
This bemusement by superficial ideas, this neck-bending to quacks, this
endless appetite for sesames and apocalypses, is depressingly visible in
our native literature, as it is in our native theology, philosophy and
politics. "The British and American mind," says W. L. George,[5] "has
been long honey-combed with moral impulse, at any rate since the
Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the middle
of the Nineteenth Century." The artist, facing an audience which seems
incapable of differentiating between aesthetic and ethical values, tends
to become a preacher of sonorous nothings, and the actual
moralist-propagandist finds his way into art well greased.
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