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.
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