In Love’s Pilgrimage, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself heard.  In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be devoted to an annoying task.  Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no such philosophy.  He dramatizes Thyrsis’s hungry longings and cruel disappointments on Thyrsis’s own terms, making the boy out a martyr with powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant genius down.  Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but those who are straining at a similar leash.  So also in The Profits of Religion—­which is to the present age what The Age of Reason was to an earlier revolutionary generation—­Mr. Sinclair excessively simplifies religious history by reducing almost the whole process to a conspiracy on the part of priestcraft to hoodwink the people and so to fatten its own greedy purse.  He must know that the process has not been quite so simple; but, leaving to others to say the things that all will say, he studies “supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to privilege.”  Here again his instincts and methods as a melodramatist assert themselves:  he warms to the struggle and plays his lash upon his conspiring priests in a mood of mingled duty and delight.

The Profits of Religion and The Brass Check belong to a series of treatises on the economic interpretation of culture which will later examine education and literature as these two have examined the church and journalism and which collectively will bear the title The Dead Hand.  Against the malign domination of the present by the past Mr. Sinclair directs his principal assault.  In the arts he sees the dead hand holding the classics on their thrones and thrusting back new masterpieces as they appear; in religion he sees it clothing the visions of ancient poets in steel creeds and rituals and denying that such visions can ever come to later spirits; in human society he sees it welding the manacles of caste and hardening this or that temporary pattern of life to a perpetual order.  As he repeatedly suspects conspiracy where none exists, so he repeatedly suspects deliberate malice where he should perceive stupidity.

Now stupidity, though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can devise, is less employable as a villain:  it is not anthropomorphic enough for melodrama.  Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual.  Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels more than a rational man’s contempt for the imbecility of parents who will not instruct their daughters in anything