Of course, I have cited only a few instances--those that happened to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in the old sense to a burning passion for reform--'any old' reform? Do not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed of both sexes--and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now, the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he is always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical taints has permeated fiction. 'Is not one man as good as another?' asked the demagogue. 'Of course he is, and a great deal better!' replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a popular mania for thinking all the undesirables 'a good deal better.' The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that, find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get back his charm.
Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett of sentimentality--also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr. Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter a little. 'Sentimental' is one of the most difficult catchwords in the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people quarreling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account, because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the truth. He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling's phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering with truth.