It is his intelligence which makes his satire sharp and significant; it is his conscience which lends passion to his representation and lifts him often to a true if sober eloquence.  But in at least two of his novels imagination takes him, as only imagination can take a novelist, beyond the reach of either intelligence or conscience. Together, a little cumbersome, a little sprawling, nevertheless glows with an intensity which gives off heat as well as light.  It is more than an exhaustive document upon modern marriage; it is interpretation as well. Clark’s Field, a sparer, clearer story, is even more than interpretation; it is a work of art springing from a spirit which has taken fire and has transmuted almost all its abstract conceptions into genuine flesh and blood.  That Clark’s Field is Mr. Herrick’s latest novel heightens the expectation with which one hears that after a silence of seven years he now plans to return to fiction.

4.  UPTON SINCLAIR

The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art.  In his youth he was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly confident.  His first character—­the hero of Springtime and Harvest and of The Journal of Arthur Stirling—­belonged to the lamenting race of the minor poets, shaped his beauty in deep seclusion, and died because it went unrecognized.  Mr. Sinclair, though he had created Stirling in his own image, did not die.  Instead he began to study the causes of public deafness and found the injustices which ever since he has devoted his enormous energy to exposing.  If that original motive seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent ardor to his crusade.  And if he had not discovered so much injustice to chronicle—­if there had not been so much for him to discover—­he must have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought.

As the evidences have accumulated he has been spared the need of complaining merely because another minor poet was neglected and has been able to widen his accusations until they include the whole multitude of oppressions which free spirits have to contend against when they face machines and privilege and mortmain.  The industrial system which true prophets have unanimously condemned for a century and a half helped to pack Mr. Sinclair’s records from the first; the war, with its vast hysteria and blind panic, made it superfluous for him to add much commentary in Jimmie Higgins and 100% to the veritable episodes which he there recounted.  On some occasions fact itself has the impetus of propaganda.  The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool, dangerous art of Thomas Paine.