ending is pitched in a discordant note of
tragedy. The tragic conclusion is appropriate to a tale of passion, or
to a tale which arouses a sense of the most urgent things in life. But
to turn a slender sentiment into a thing of tragedy is to pass the
limits of sentiment; it cannot carry the burden. The conclusion is not
true enough to be even shocking. It is merely disgusting.

How is it that this mimicry of sentiment proves effective in moving
the multitude, when the real thing so often fails to please? The
answer, I think, is, that the artistic imagination can neither express
itself through distorted objects, nor can it confuse in one blurred
series of images the trivial and the urgent; its business being to see
life with such sense of proportion as the concentrated artistic vision
of the artist ensures. But careless readers do not see objects until
they are exaggerated out of resemblance to life; the adjustments of
the artistic vision are too delicate to reach their perceptions. Mr.
Thurston's little boy is seen to be very good, and to the
sentimentalist his mere goodness is "beautiful." When he tramps across
London his fatigue is sad, and the sadness of it is beautiful. When
the rich gentleman gives him sixpence instead of fifty pounds, the
reader sheds happy, thoughtless tears, and his beautiful death at the
end is all that he requires as the final "assault upon his feelings."
The phrase, of course, is Stevenson's, and it can hardly be avoided.
Popularity rewards the writer who can _assault_ the feelings of his
readers, and anyone who uses a more delicate method must be content
with a smaller circle of readers.

It is in this manner, amiably enough, that Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox
can conquer America with sentimental poems, as Ian Maclaren once
conquered England with sentimental stories. They touch us where the
intellect and the common sense are in abeyance, and the moral sense is
steeped in false sentiment. Thus it was that when a sort of torpor
came upon the intellect and the common sense of Mr. A.C. Benson, he,
who had been formerly a scholar and a friend of literature, became
merely a sentimentalist. The author of _The Sick-a-bed Lady_ (Eleanor
Halliwell Abbott) is for the same reason esteemed as highly in America
as the author of _Letters to My Son_ is esteemed in England. The
trowel is the instrument with which these honours--and these
fortunes--are won.

III. It might seem that the popular literature of lov