CHEERS AND TEARS

The sophisticates have new matter for sneers, the aesthetics for despair, for the American list of "best-sellers" has been compiled. Controversy inexhaustible will be drawn from every literary well; but "What does it prove?" asks the Nation.

Like all good facts, statistical or otherwise, it may be bent to prove almost anything and one may find in it, as in the Bible, whatever one looks for. The bad boy from Baltimore, Mr. Mencken, will no doubt declare it proof incontrovertible of hopeless literary flabbiness, and the flag-waving Mr. Sherman will somehow find in it another splendid victory for "the American spirit". But who can imagine Messrs. Sherman and Mencken on any common ground?

The list is an excellent commentary on culture under a democracy and, as such, is a subject neither for exultation nor for despair. If Zane Gray and Oliver Curwood seem complacent and unaesthetic to the intelligentsia, they are, nevertheless, the first choice of a complacent and unaesthetic mobocracy. If in this country, unlike Russia, there is no Tchaikowsky, neither are there downtrodden serfs. The peaks of achievement have been sacrificed for the development of the average. "The greatest good of the greatest number" is a theory that makes for social justice but hardly for the greatest art.