Churchill,
with the late Jack London to bear him company, may stand for a large
class; in its lower ranks are such men as Reginald Wright Kauffman and
Will Levington Comfort. Still more typical of the national taste for
moral purpose and quack philosophy are the professional optimists and
eye-dimmers, with their two grand divisions, the boarding-school
romantics and the Christian Endeavor Society sentimentalists. Of the
former I give you George Barr McCutcheon, Owen Wister, the late Richard
Harding Davis, and a horde of women--most of them now humanely
translated to the moving pictures. Of the latter I give you the fair
authors of the "glad" books, so gigantically popular, so lavishly
praised in the newspapers--with the wraith of the later Howells, the
virtuous, kittenish Howells, floating about in the air above them. No
other country can parallel this literature, either in its copiousness or
in its banality. It is native and peculiar to a civilization which
erects the unshakable certainties of the misinformed and quack-ridden
into a national way of life.
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