Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/24

 physical purposes. A poet or a painter in California in '49 or in the middle west in Abraham Lincoln's day would have been a nuisance and a pest.

A man I know was during the war arrested and sent to jail for being opposed to war, and I was discussing his fate with a friend.

"He ought to be sent to jail," said my friend. "He ought to be hung. Any man ought to be hung who doesn't know any better than to be right when all other decent healthy people in the world are wrong."

However, let me return to my theme. I am trying to sketch briefly some of the conditions that are at the bottom of what I conceive to be going on nowadays in American writing. When we Americans had got our country pretty well settled and had fought and won our Civil War, something else happened. There came a revolution more widespread and deep