its hood off and takes wing.  And yet he knows that the north woods into which a few favored men and women may withdraw are not cure enough for the multitude.  They must practise, or some one must practise for their benefit, honorable refusals in the midst of life.  The architect’s wife in The Common Lot, Harrington’s sister in The Memoirs of an American Citizen, the clear-eyed Johnstons in Together—­they have or attain the knowledge, which seems a paradox, that selfishness can fatally entangle the individual in the perplexities of existence and that the best chance for disentanglement may come from intelligent unselfishness.

Clark’s Field amply illustrates this paradox.  The field has for many years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom.  Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama:  the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned.  Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a well-meant law has grown malevolent, resolve to break the spell by surrendering their selfish interests and accepting the position of unselfish trustees to the estate until—­if that time ever comes—­some better means may be devised for making the earth serve the purposes of those who live upon it.

The solution does not entirely satisfy, of course.  At best it is a makeshift if considered in its larger bearings.  It comes near, however, to solving the problems as individuals of Adelle and her cousin, who save more in character than they lose in pocket.  And it might possibly have come nearer still were it not for the handicap under which Mr. Herrick, for all his intelligence and conscience, has labored as an artist.  That handicap is a certain stiffness on the plastic side of his imagination.  His conceptions come to him, if criticism can be any judge, with a large touch of the abstract about them; his rationalizing intelligence is always present at their birth.  Nor do his narratives, once under way, flow with the sure, effortless movement which is natural to born story-tellers.  His imagination, not quite continuous enough, occasionally fails to fuse and shape disparate materials.  It is likely to fall short when he essays fancy or mystery, as in A Life for a Life; or when he has a whimsy for amusing melodrama, as in His Great Adventure.  The flexibility which reveals itself in humor or in the lighter irony is not one of his principal endowments.  Restrained and direct as he always is so far as language goes, he cannot always keep his action absolutely in hand:  this or that person or incident now and then breaks out of the pattern; the skeleton of a formula now and then becomes too prominent.