The sun., 1915-10-16

must not only he fathered and moihered
ne must be evoked. welcomed and given
freedom by his people
To be again concrete: The New
Yorker believes that he may eat
;el at his best restaurants. In truth
" eats wretchedly. In two restaurants
.nerc-though IT may be bit one at this
writing-one may. after diplomatic nego-
;iations of the most delicate and involved
character. OBTAIN for an enormous sum "A
really good dinner. But only such
dinner as may be had quickly on demand
ut any one of twenty restaurants In
Paris and for half the price. ! refer
of course to those restaurants In the
French quarters of Paris that have
survived the invasion of the American
gourmet whose ideal is n nice steak
and hashed brown potatoes. with ice
cream and a slab of apple pie to come.
on the boulevards. to be sure. one may
here and there dine as badly and cN-
pensivcly as one must in the best res
taurant along Broadway. Again the
matter Of demand for the artist New
York restaurants unquestionably have
the talent in their Kitchens for better
cookery. But there is no demand for
Il. The New Yorker buys--and is sat
isnei with-good food badly cooked
For his fiction he buys-and is satisfied
with-good material badly written. For
better novels. then. we must have a de-
mand no less than a clear thinking So
ciety to produce the novelists.
Especially must we have clear think
ing about that phase Of human as
sociation at present notorious as sex"
What those Continental artists would
have written about in these United
states one can only conjecture, but cer-
tainly they could not have lowered to
their fun here where our every approach
10 this vital relationship is still likely
to be that of the bad little boy who
scrawls things he shouldn't on dead
walls Indeed. 1t is not altogether their
own fault that We have a school of
writers skilled in exploiting the merely
concupiscent-made doubly nauseous by
its sentimentally punctilious correct
ness" So long as we shirk the facing
OF life in its entirety we must share
the blame for this--shall We call II the
novel of near adultery? The adept of
this school plays endlessly on the one
theme. His herones differ from one
another as sharply as do chocolate
eclars among themselves. lie is con-
cerned solely with their biological diff
ferentiation from his males. That this
is uniformly simple he leaves his readers
in no doubt. In an early chapter ne
gets the girl into-or out of-something
revealing every line of her 1.-THE young
igure." Short of clinical tests he could
go no further.
on this point a group Of women re-
/ Gently petitioned the art director Of the
San Francisco exposition to withdraw
from view there a painting By a Hun
garian artist entitled THE Expectant
Mother one gathers that the title
damned the picture with these protest.
ants. Had il read "Apres lc Balm or
''tne Femme Inconnue' or perhaps any
thing In French. they would doubtless
have ga,cd and passed on--shccked per-
haps. but not indignant And not i'm
/ possibly among them now are women
/ vino thrill convcntionally 10 the always
legal COncupiscence-the trained and
never indecorous lubricity--of these lat
est current gods of the partially
literate.
Such mental obliquity Is of course not
| local to the Pacific coast Boston would
/ have no dancing bacchante. and New
! York did its utmost to befoul the naked
! little beauty OF September Morn" And
at least San Francisco makes no mud
/ died ado about the ingestion of Sunday
= cocktails.
/ The lettering OF the American novel
/ must await on this mental clearing up.
/ ! have faith that II will keep pace with
our growth in the power of clean. clear
T thinking But we must not expect II
( 10 lead that by any great distance.
There remains only the danger that
our bigger novelist when he finds him
self will choose to live in England. as
once one did with the most distressing
. results Yet, forever. to Henry James
the credit for leading Us a little way
. at least from the tale Of external Incl
dent--the true Victorian novel His later
degeneration should not blind US 10 this
| service. Did England stfe his genius
I..-I L. -. lx...
grow hereto tumble with his blood
less. back parlor intr!gues, his tepid
laisuus, his studies of the reaction oi
the child mind confronted with normal
human lechery or with obscenities no,
TO be more than hinted at even by tn,
! master of limiting? Anyway. he was
/ lost to us-once our novelist Of grea'
promise. And the pathos OF his belatet
official exit, He had lived the years
there in "A fusSy pasteboard world such
as the times let him blandly conceive
a world in which there could be M
blood or tears, or struggle with augh
but adveibs and nalf conception ,
human speech. Probably nothing less
than world war could have awakened
Nj. James to reality. and no one ! thinl
can fully apprase the shock this mus
have been to him. Human beings on
there, Acting in rude human ways OF
vast and bloody stage, Doing thing,
one never did in the James scheme o.
things Blood and tears and rabio
strife Small wonder he lost his head
Small wonder he did something that
had he been a truer humorist, would
have been the last act he could hav'
thought Of at 50 poignant time II
taking tine citizenship of Henry James
from us the war has provided Ameri
can letters with its supreme blend o
. the comic and the pathetic
May our next artist of like pronis
read his annals and his novels and shrinl
in horror IRON his course, even If w
would, for yet a time. cramp him to thu
dcphlog isticated piffie Of the rubbe
stamp hero who goes "out west" to builC
an irrigation dam or 20 keep trees fron
burning up and nobly wins the love o
pure young American girl hged 10.