to live in the world which nearly destroys him, though he finally comprehends the danger and escapes her.  And in Together, its epic canvas crowded with all kinds and conditions of lovers and married couples, Mr. Herrick never spares the type.  Other novelists may be content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral development.  Hard and wilful enough, she never becomes mature, and she tangles the web of life with the heedless hands of a child.

A less reflective novelist might be content with blaming or satirizing her for her blind instinct to marry her richest suitor; for forcing him, once married, to support her and her children at a pitch of luxury which demands that he give up his personal aspirations in art or science or altruism; for struggling so ruthlessly to plant her daughters in prosperous soil which will nourish the “sacred seed” of the race abundantly.  Mr. Herrick, however, does not disapprove such instincts for their own sake.  He sees in them an element furnishing mankind with one of its valuable sources of stability.  What he assails is a national conception which endows women with these instincts in mean, trivial, unenlightened forms.

His criticism of the American Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely pretenses.  It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him.  In The Common Lot, in The Memoirs of an American Citizen, in Clark’s Field, and in certain of the strands of Together it is the women who demand that, no matter what happens, they shall be allowed to live their lives upon the high plane of integrity from which the casual world is always trying to pull men and women down.  Integrity in love, integrity in personal conduct, integrity in business and public affairs—­this Mr. Herrick holds to with a profound, at times a bleak, consistency which has both worried and limited his readers.  Integrity in love leads Margaret Pole in Together, for instance, from her foolish husband to her lover during one lyric episode and thereafter holds them apart in the consciousness of a love completed and not to be touched with perishable flesh.  In novel after novel the characters come to grief from the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents it, seems a serious offense against integrity—­springing from a failure to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of superfluous things until it ceases to be itself.  And with never wearied iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation to get easy wealth and cut a false figure in the world.