Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/146

 hatred and violence and journalistic sensationalism. Chicago tends to encourage "journalistic" sensationalism by recognizing and rewarding nothing else. Chicago authors—in this respect, to be sure, resembling Baltimore critics—feel obliged to yell in order to make themselves heard above the street cars and the newspapers. Now, a yell is often a necessary act. It is often an appropriate act. But a yell lacks one of the fine qualities of literature: it lacks charm. It seems to originate in fear or hatred, and it tends to provoke hatred and fear—unless it is promptly followed by notes of reassurance. Midwestern satire has not merely stripped the average man naked but has skinned him alive. He will remain a pitiful and abhorrent object till he gets a new skin. And the Chicago writers generally haven't the faintest notion where a new skin is to be had.

By those who profess knowledge of this recondite subject, I have been informed that the only way to get a woman to tell you anything of vivid interest about herself is to persuade her that you love her. Before you reach that point, she will give you gossip and scandal and even intellectual propositions of possibly some academic interest; but she will reveal none of the delightful things about her heart—none of the finer perfume and subtler fragrance of personality. I have often thought of this secret while vainly seeking year after year through the works of the midwestern novelists for anything that Henry James, for example, would recognize as the portrait of a lady. Presently I began to ask myself; "Has