“I love it; I was brought up in it, but all my life I’ve had to struggle against the South’s sentimentality, which I inherit. We shall sooner or later have to tear asunder that veil of sentimentality. Our people will have to realize that a statement made in criticism of the South is not an act of disloyalty. Please say that in as kind a way as possible,” Miss Glasgow added, probably with some compunction, for, as she said on another occasion, when asked what the Southerners thought about her: “I have no idea. They are very kind to me.” To finish her words about the struggle with inherited sentimentality: “I say it as a Southerner,” she explained. “We must cultivate within us truth instead of sentimentality, which up to now has been our darling vice.” These words were uttered in New York in the fall of 1912, a few months before the publication of her novel _Virginia_, the title referring, however, not to her State, but to the heroine of the book, Virginia Pendleton. You can’t fight sentimentality with tolerance and it is Miss Glasgow’s handicap that to write the great books she has written, to succeed as she has succeeded under the most adverse conditions and in the most adverse environment, she has had to contract her horizon, even to shut her eyes and thrust with all her might ahead. Surrounded by sentimentality and the tradition of a past whose glorious perfection it were treason to question, she has not been able always to see things clearly and to see them whole. In the early part of 1916 she declared that contemporary English fiction was superior to American fiction, that Americans were demanding from writers and politicians alike an “evasive idealism” and a “sham optimism” and “a sugary philosophy, utterly without any basis in logic or human experience.” There was some more to the same effect, but let us not harrow the souls of ourselves who rejoice in Ellen Glasgow’s work by recalling any more of it. She was wrong, dead wrong; we think she would be the first to admit it now, but whether she would or not she is pretty completely to be excused if never to be defended. She was best answered at the time by Booth Tarkington, the greatest living American writer of fiction, with the allowable exception of William Dean Howells. Said Tarkington: “It is human nature to desire optimism in anybody--in a doctor, or a friend, or a farm hand, or a dog. Of course, the public desires optimism in a book, and it wants not the ‘cheapest sort of sham optimism,’ but the finest sort of genuine optimism that it can understand. Naturally, the average understanding isn’t the highest understanding; nevertheless, the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.” Mr. Tarkington went on to say: