Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/144

 of them lacked a heart-ravishing trochaic epithet for anything—for April or a hedgerow or a tuft of violets—he called it "English," and let it go at that. He said: "an English April," or "an English hedgerow" or "English violets"; and he could count on his readers for the rest. Though they might hate the British government and be cold to the British Empire, when he said "English" their hearts would thrill to an immemorial loveliness. They would feel beauty descending like dew upon all these familiar objects from the hearts of English men and women who have loved them for a thousand years.

So in America, whenever a writer wishes to bring home to his readers in a single heavily charged epithet the quintessence of materialism, flatness, monotony, crassness, violence, revolt, disgust, he almost instinctively nowadays calls it "midwestern," and lets it go at that. He says "midwestern materialism," "midwestern monotony," "midwestern crassness," "midwestern violence," "midwestern disgust;" and his reader feels disillusion descending upon the prairie lands and the prairie cities from the hearts of midwestern writers who have hated their environment with an increasing hatred for the last thirty years.

Carlyle praised Byron for having had at least the good sense not to be happy in this most miserable of worlds. On the same principle, we should praise our own eloquent apostles of disillusion: Mr. Garland, Mr. Herrick, Mr. Dreiser, Mr. Sinclair Lewis, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Hecht, Mr. Bodenheim,