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The excessive commercialisation of literature in the past decade is now turned against the very magazines which fostered it. The magazines which bought and sold fiction like soap are beginning to repent of it all. They have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. This fight for sincerity in the short story is a fight that is worth making. It is at the heart of all that for which I am striving.
The latter should at least be universal hospitality. It ought to be possible for man to wander where he will over this little world of ours and never fail to find free food and shelter and love. I know no greater shame in national development than the commercialisation of the meal and the night's lodging. It has been our great disinheritance.
The public might very well retort that they get precious little chance to listen to it, since royalty ballads come first: nor to come in contact with it, for the ordinary dealer does not stock it. There, then, is the vicious circle quite complete. But the poets are not paralysed, they are merely inarticulate by reason of this commercialisation of Art.
Talk to him of religion, and show that you believe the mystery of Christ; talk to him of life, and show that you believe in love and happiness; talk to him of woman, and show that you understand anything about her unsexually; talk to him of work, and show that though you are poor you have no regard for money and the bourgeois is uneasy.... Instead of opera, the gramophone; instead of the theatre, the kinematograph; instead of national literature, the cheap translation; instead of national life, a miserable imitation of modern English life.... It may be thought that there is little harm in the commercialisation of the Russian, the secularising of his life; and that after all the bourgeois population of England, France, and Germany is not so bad as not to be on the way to something better.
The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the American colleges and universities, where business principles have supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the same lines that have led so many of the country towns effectually outside the cultural pale.
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