But in America no such general
rising of the blood has ever been seen. The literature of the nation,
even the literature of the enlightened minority, has been under harsh
Puritan restraints from the beginning, and despite a few stealthy
efforts at revolt--usually quite without artistic value or even common
honesty, as in the case of the cheap fiction magazines and that of
smutty plays on Broadway, and always very short-lived--it shows not the
slightest sign of emancipating itself today. The American, try as he
will, can never imagine any work of the imagination as wholly devoid of
moral content. It must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be
suspect and abominable.
If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical articles in
the newspapers and literary weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs
in a month's explorations to convince you forever. A novel or a play is
judged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty,
its perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its orthodoxy of
doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract.
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