Possibly it was a youth spent in New England that made Mr. Herrick as sensitive as he has been to the atmosphere of affairs in Chicago, where fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil.  Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure which Americans take in Europe.  But Chicago is the true center of his universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring village so rapidly turned town.  He has not, however, been blown with the prevailing winds.  The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage.  Something in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk with opportunity.

Is it the scholar in him, or the New Englander, or the moralist which has compelled him to count the moral cost of material expansion?  In the first of his novels to win much of a hearing, The Common Lot, he studies the career of an architect who becomes involved in the frauds of dishonest builders and sacrifices his professional integrity for the sake of quick, dangerous profits. The Memoirs of an American Citizen, a precious document now too much neglected, follows a country youth of good initial impulses through his rise and progress among the packers and on to the Senate of the United States.  This is one of the oldest themes in literature, one of the themes most certain to succeed with any public:  Dick Whittington, the Industrious Apprentice, over again.  Mr. Herrick, however, cannot merely repeat the old drama or point the old moral.  His hero wriggles upward by devious ways and sharp practices, crushing competitors, diverting justice, and gradually paying for his fortune with his integrity.  In the most modern idiom Mr. Herrick asks again and again the ancient question whether the whole world is worth as much as a man’s soul.

That mystical rigor which permits but one answer to the question suggests to Mr. Herrick two avenues of cure from the evils accompanying the disease he broods upon.  One is a return to simple living under conditions which quiet the restless nerves, allay the greedy appetites, and restore the central will.  The Master in The Master of the Inn, Renault in Together, Holden in The Healer—­all of them utter and live a gospel of health which obviously corresponds to Mr. Herrick’s belief.  When the world grows too loud one may withdraw from it; there are still uncrowded spaces where existence marches simply.  Remembering them, Mr. Herrick’s imagination, held commonly on so tight a fist, slips