It is far from the purpose of this characterization to indulge in any general literary criticism, or completely to assess the movement now in question. The only reason for alluding to it is that here, in a clearly influential portion of current writing, the disillusionment now under consideration is a ruling presence. The spirit of it is displayed in fiction, drama, poetry, and biography. It is bent upon stripping off the disguises of men, puncturing their pride, and revealing them as creatures of elemental, a-moral, not-to-be-denied impulses. Now and then an impression of power is conveyed by the sheer intensity or explosiveness of an instinctive desire, but anon human wants appear narrow, mean, vulgar, or sordid. “Spoon River” and “Main Street!” Authors psychologizing, just as diplomats do, with hard cynicism. And this cynicism is not intended as caricature, with its precious privilege of telling the truth by exaggeration, nor satire, isolating foibles in order to put them into the pillory; the literature in question intends to present the actuality of human life as against the conventionalized dreaming of the Victorian period. Two or three examples may be adduced for the sake of concreteness. A reviewer gives the following exposition of the philosophy of life that actuates Mr. Dreiser’s novels: “To him it seemed ... that novelists, ... enamoured of moral delicacy and psychological subtleties, ... had forgotten the simple motives by which the vast majority of mankind are moved; so with a single shrug he sloughed off once and for all the implications of the theory that man is primarily a moral animal, and he did this much as the behaviorists in psychology sloughed off the soul. He adopted, instead, what he called ‘a theory of animal conduct.’” The leading character in Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” the reviewer goes on to say, “is not unaware of the moral precepts which his parents have inculcated, nor is he unmoved by the thought of another’s pain. But these things are pale shadows in comparison with needs and lusts which are nourished, not by ideas and habits, but by blood. They may go forth to battle but they never win; they may haunt the mind like overtones or like ghosts but they never direct a crucial action.... At no point in all the vast and closely woven story does any motive based upon moral, social, or religious abstractions count” (Joseph Wood Krutch in the _Nation_, Feb. 10, 1926, p. 152).