bers, with his "society" romances for
shop-girls; Irvin Cobb, with his laboured, _Ayers' Almanac_ jocosity;
the authors of the _Saturday Evening Post_ school, with their heroic
drummers and stockbrokers, their ecstatic celebration of the stupid, the
sordid, the ignoble--these, after all, are our typical _literati_. The
Puritan fear of ideas is the master of them all. Some of them, in
truth, most of them, have undeniable talent; in a more favourable
environment not a few of them might be doing sound work. But they see
how small the ring is, and they make their tricks small to fit it. Not
many of them ever venture a leg outside. The lash of the ringmaster is
swift, and it stings damnably....

I say not many; I surely do not mean none at all. As a matter of fact,
there have been intermittent rebellions against the prevailing
pecksniffery and sentimentality ever since the days of Irving and
Hawthorne. Poe led one of them--as critic more than as creative artist.
His scathing attacks upon the Gerald Stanley Lees, the Hamilton Wright
Mabies and the George E. Woodberrys of his time keep a liveliness and
appositeness that the years have not staled; his criticism deserves to
be better remembered. Poe sensed the Philistine pull of a Puritan
civilization as none had before him, and combated it with his whole
artillery of rhetoric. Another rebel, of course, was Whitman; how he
came to grief is too well known to need recalling. What is less familiar
is the fact that both the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _Century_ (first
called _Scribner's_) were set up by men in revolt against the reign of
mush, as _Putnam's_ and the _Dial_ had been before them. The salutatory
of the _Dial_, dated 1840, stated the case against the national
mugginess clearly. The aim of the magazine, it said, was to oppose "that
rigour of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us
to stone" and to give expression to "new views and the dreams of youth."
Alas, for these brave _revoltes_! _Putnam's_ succumbed to the
circumambient rigours and duly turned to stone, and is now no more. The
_Atlantic_, once so heretical, has become as respectable as the New York
_Evening Post_. As for the _Dial_, it was until lately the very pope of
orthodoxy and jealously guarded the college professors who read it from
the pollution of ideas. Only the _Century_ has kept the faith
unbrokenly. It is, indeed, the one first-class American magazine that
has always welcomed newco