Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/46

 found out. There is a small public growing up that has discrimination enough to want good work. Honest books begin to sell a little. Honest painting that isn't just pretty picture making begins to sell. Puritanism, as such, is pretty well licked. It cannot any longer so easily suppress books of artistic merit because some housewife is afraid the morals of her daughter, who has just come home from the movies or the Follies, will be ruined by being told how babies happen to be born. The force of the New England moralistic culture is spent. Today in America any man of talent who writes a book that is significant, a work of art, can get it published and there will be critics to acclaim him. The real pioneering for the better workmen has been done by men like Whitman and Dreiser for the writers, and others like Stieglitz, Marin and the critics Rosenfeld, Cheney and others for the painters.