Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/151



My quarrel with the Dreiser-Hecht school of monoptic novelists and with the Menckenian school of monoptic critics is not that they fail to see sharply but that they are stone blind of one eye, and that: they tend to transmit this monoptic peculiarity to all their literary posterity. I have professed my admiration for the intensity of their limited vision. They see very well the turmoil of instinctive and passional life which seethes beneath the surface of civilized and moralized life. Their disclosures of the subconventional welter have the value for us of all explorations of dark continents. I accept many: of their conclusions about the obscure territory which they have traversed. I think, for example, that they are probably right in representing the subconventional relationships of the mass of human beings as almost indescribably lustful and hateful.

It is only when they begin to reason about the value of the subconvenionalsubconventional [sic] life as compared with the civilized and moralized life that they appear to me to be afflicted with blindness. Having demonstrated, very ably demonstrated, that the subconventional life is lustful and hateful, they next proceed