t cannot be
discerned. Regarding thus cheerfully and hopefully its own sorrows,
it is not overtroubled by those of others, however tender and
helpful its sympathies may be. It is impossible to weep much for
that in others which we should smile at in ourselves; and when we
see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a small
misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated by contempt
for its cowardice.

There may be gaiety and joy in the novels of Harold Bell Wright and Mrs.
Gene Stratton-Porter, but it seems to me to be a cheerfulness which is
not quite the real thing. It is too sentimental and rather too laboured.
These two authors, who, if the value of a writer could really depend on
the majority of the votes cast for him, would, with the goldenrod, be
our national flowers, seem to work too hard in the pursuit of
cheerfulness.

Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman what supported the pleasant
town of Stratford-on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearian
industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mrs.
Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be
very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that
delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the
really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be
real he must be joyless--in the United States, at least--is perhaps
because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic
sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters.
But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright nor
Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as to
assume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
had no value. They pleased exactly the same class of people, in their
day, which delights in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They answered
to the demand of a public that is moral and religious, that needs to be
taken into countries which savoured something of Fairyland, and yet
which are framed by reality. However, as long as Mrs. Gene
Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, and novelists of higher
philosophical aspirations, like the author of "The Age of Innocence,"
and "Blind Mice," and "Zell," and "Main Street," continue to write,
there is no danger that the general crowd of American readers will be
shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs