[2] In this survey of the case against the Puritan the author does not claim to adhere to a literal rendering of the views of the different critics. Many of the comments and examples are his own. [3] A foreigner who goes to the American “movies” would not contradict Mr. Mencken on this point. The policeman, as a _deus ex machina_, to wind up a plot and bring in a happy ending, has no rival on the American screen except perhaps the young girl, acting as Salvation Nell. A squad of police rushing to the scene of a row or of an assault, provided it arrives on the psychological moment, is sure to raise the enthusiasm of the audience to the limit. Moral rescue by the police is the most popular form of the Aristotelian _catharsis_ in America. [4] The “leavings aside” of Theodore Dreiser in this indictment are frequent enough to call for a fairer balance of the whole account when all is told. I refer the reader, for a retort on this point, to the first pages of this chapter, where I take the liberty to be much more optimistic concerning the intellectual capital of America. [5] Messrs. Harvey O’Higgins and Reede. [6] A revaluation of most of the great American representative men and women has taken place in the United States recently, in the light of _ex professo_ Freudism and psychoanalysis. See the books of Crutch on Edgar Poe, Van Wyck Brooks on Mark Twain, Anthony on Margaret Fuller, Wood on Amy Lowell, etc., etc. This is another aspect of the intellectual revolt in America to-day. [7] This example is the author’s. [8] This mother complex is one of the most difficult American idiosyncrasies for the European to understand. The sublimation of instincts in America reaches its limits in married life when the wife becomes in familiar appellation “mother.” This American complex has no equivalent in the Old World. [9] The author of this book had a first-hand impression of the power of the American woman as a censor when, in a certain city of the West, an Association of Christian Mothers interfered to stop the production of Charles Vildrac’s “Paquebot Tenacity.” Vildrac’s play, for the un-Puritan critic, is a most moral play. It dramatizes the problem of free will. It stages the conflict between a strong and a weak man, both of them in the hands of Fate. The American “mothers” did not see these moral issues. They were only concerned with a dialogue between one of the characters and a maid around a bottle of champagne. The suppression in New York City more recently of “The Captive,” a Freudian play of the first order, marked another triumph for the “motherly complex.” Eugene O’Neill’s Ibsenian drama “Desire under the Elms” was interdicted in Los Angeles lately by the same “complex.” Meanwhile nude exhibitions which could hardly be tolerated even in Montmartre are allowed to proceed along every “gay White Way” throughout the United States.