Mr. Garland could neither feel so free nor fly so far from home as James.  He had, in the midst of his raptures and his successes in New England, still to remember the plight of the family he had left behind him on the lonely prairie; he cherished a patriotism for his province which went a long way toward restoring him to it in time.  Sentimental and romantic considerations, however, did not influence him altogether in his first important work.  He had been kindled by Howells in Boston to a passion for realism which carried him beyond the suave accuracy of his master to the somber veracity of Main-Travelled Roads, Prairie Folks, and Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly.  This veracity was more than somber; it was deliberate and polemic.  Mr. Garland, ardently a radical of the school of Henry George, had enlisted in the crusade against poverty, and he desired to tell the unheeded truth about the frontier farmers and their wives in language which might do something to lift the desperate burdens of their condition.  Consequently his passions and his doctrines joined hands to fix the direction of his art; he both hated the frontier and hinted at definite remedies which he thought would make it more endurable.

It throws a strong light upon the progress of American society and literature during the past generation to point out that the service recently performed by Main Street was, in its fashion, performed thirty years ago by Main-Travelled Roads.  Each book challenges the myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the farmers were oppressed.  His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment snatch away all that labor and parsimony have stored up.  His women, endowed with no matter what initial hopes or charms, are sacrificed to overwork and deprivations and drag out maturity and old age on the weariest treadmill.  The pressure of life is simply too heavy to be borne except by the ruthless or the crafty.  Mr. Garland, though nourished on the popular legend of the frontier, had come to feel that the “song of emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives.”  Illusion no less than reality had tempted Americans toward their far frontiers, and the enormous mass, once under way, had rolled stubbornly westward, crushing all its members who might desire to hesitate or to reflect.

The romancers had studied the progress of the frontier in the lives of its victors; Mr. Garland studied it in the lives of its victims:  the private soldier returning drably and mutely from the war to resume his drab, mute career behind the plow; the tenant caught in a trap by his landlord and the law and obliged to pay for the added value which his own toil has given to his farm; the brother neglected until his