Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/27

 the worse for the leading English and American novelists. If they are all running amuck, is that any reason why the rest of us should lose our heads? If the novelists are going definitely wrong at the point which I have indicated, a critic could not be better employed than in standing at that point and calling a halt."

"You assign to criticism," I said, "a task which appeals but faintly to the critic—a task like that of a traffic policeman without authority or power. If I had all the authority in the world, I would not cry 'stop' to the novelists, even to those that I have criticized most harshly."

"And why not?"

"Because I learn too much from what they are doing to desire to dam the stream of information. The realistic novelists to-day are extraordinarily copious, candid, and illuminating confessors of private morals. I have, to be sure, been troubled by the fact that the lives of respectable people are so seldom revealed in these confessions. I have even allowed myself to wonder faintly at times whether unwillingness to confess may not be, as our direful Mid-Western school contends, the chief distinction between respectable people and the other sort. It is a horrid doubt, concerning