Accordingly, it is not surprising to find F. Scott Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine looking at the towers of Princeton and musing:

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought; all faiths in man shaken....

Nobody wrote as well as that in Copeland's course at Harvard but there was a pretty general agreement that life—or rather Life—was a sham and a delusion. This was expressed in poems lamenting the fact that the oceans and the mountains were going to go on and that the writer wouldn't.

Generally he didn't give the oceans or the mountains very long either. All the short stories were about murder and madness. We cut our patterns into very definite conclusions because we were pessimists and sure of ourselves. It was the most logical of philosophies and disposed of all loose ends. One of my pieces (to polish off a theme on the futility of human wishes) was about a man who went stark raving, and Copeland sat in his chair and groaned and moaned, which was his substitute for making little marks in red ink. He had been reading Sheridan's "The Critic" to the class with the scene in which the two faithless Spanish lovers and the two nieces and the two uncles all try to kill each other at the same time, and are thus thrown into the most terrific stalemate until the author's ingenious contrivance of a beefeater who cries, "Drop your weapons in the Queen's name." At any rate when I had finished the little man ceased groaning and shook his head about my story of the man who went mad. "Broun," he said, "try to solve your problems without recourse to death, madness—or any other beefeater in the Queen's name."

And it seems to me that the young pessimists, generally speaking, have allowed themselves to be bound in a formula as tight as that which ever afflicted any Pollyanna. It isn't the somberness with which they imbue life which arouses our protest, so much as the regularity. They paint life not only as a fake fight in which only one result is possible, but they make it again and again the selfsame fight.

XXVI
GLASS SLIPPERS BY THE GROSS

When Cinderella sat in the ashes she should have consoled herself with the thought of the motion-picture rights. No young woman of our time has had her adventures so ceaselessly celebrated in film and drama. Of course, she generally goes by some other name. It might be "Miss Lulu Bett," for instance.

For our part, we must confess that much as we like Zona Gale's modern and middle-western version of the old tale, Cinderella is beginning to lose favor with us. Her appeal in the first place rested on the fact that she was abused and neglected, but by this time the ashes have become the skimpiest sort of interlude. You just know that the fairy godmother is waiting in the wings, and you can hear the great coach honking around the corner. Undoubtedly, the order for the glass slippers was placed months in advance. More than likely it called for a gross, since there are ever so many Cinderella feet to fit these days—what with Peg and Kiki and Sally and Irene and all the authentic members of the family. Indeed, for a time, Cinderella was spreading herself around so lavishly in dramatic fiction that one sex was not enough to contain her, and we had a Cinderella Man. All the usual perquisites were his except the glass slipper.

And now the time has come when the original poetic justice due to the miss by the kitchen stove has quite worn off. Cinderella has been paid in full, but how about her two ugly sisters? They have gone down the ages without honor or rewards. Each time their aspirations are blighted. Although eminently conscientious in fulfilling their social duties, it has availed them nothing. We are determined not to welcome the story again until it appears in a revised form. In the version which we favor, Prince Charming will try the glass slipper upon Cinderella, and then turn away without enthusiasm, remarking in cutting manner, "It is not a fit. Your foot is much too small." One of the ugly sisters will be sitting somewhat timidly in the background, and it will be to her the Prince will turn, exclaiming rapturously: "A perfect number nine!"

And they lived happily ever after.