Indeed, in the age of the telegraph and of the telephone, brevity and terseness are attained even in literary style and in scientific writing.
In 1914, when the war was coming on in Europe, an American periodical began to publish satirical poems, ostensibly written by the dead in protest against the lying eulogies upon their tombstones; and in 1915 they were collected under the title of “The Spoon River Anthology,” by Edward Lee Masters. The very title is a satire upon America and her intellectual and moral provincialism. There were 250 such poems with an epilogue. They interested me not on account of their poetry, which was poor, but because of their revolt against current American culture and civilization. They contained philosophical arguments which Voltaire, and others before him, had used in Europe, and echoes from Browning and parts of “Faust”; they formed, indeed, a compendium of the ideas of young or, rather, youngest America. Their author, who lives in Chicago, denounces Chicago and the big American cities in general. In his eyes Jesus, for instance, is a peasant farmer who is slain in the city by the city, that is to say, by bankers, lawyers and judges.
In the footsteps of Masters, a series of writers continued this literary revolution. Dreiser describes Chicago, Titan among cities, and shows us the titanic multi-milliardaire. His strictures make Sodom and Gomorrah seem homes of virtue by comparison; for the moral decay of the Roman Caesars, of Renaissance Italy, of Paris, of Moscow, of Berlin, falls short of the decadent perversity which he attributes to Chicago and New York. Nor does Dreiser’s indictment stand alone. Anderson and many others write in the same strain.
In calling themselves realists, these critics of America imitate the Russians and the French. On principle they are opposed to Romanticism and Idealism and to modern English Transcendentalism. They wage war against the Churches, against machinery, with its moral and material effects, and therefore against industrialism, capitalism and mammonism. They assail narrow-mindedness, Pragmatism in philosophy, and the tendency to exaggerate the value of science. They stand up for complete freedom of conscience and for the emancipation of women, just as we do in Europe and they make the same mistakes as we. In opposing one-sidedness they are radically one-sided. Their aims are hazy and negative, superficial with a typically American superficiality; and, here and there, they grow rhapsodical over “free love” and fall into
