And in spite of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American picture Mr. Sinclair in Jimmie Higgins, the story of a socialist who went to war against the Kaiser, showed traces still of a romantic pulse, settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat.  It is the colder beat which throbs in 100%, with a temperature that suggests both ice and fire.  Rarely has such irony been maintained in an entire volume as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of noncombatants during the war.  To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of Virginia poured itself out in unstinting sacrifice; and, though the sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter how great a distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge?  Explicitly he does not answer his question:  his art has gone, at least for the moment, beyond avowed argument, merely marshaling the evidence with ironic skill and dispensing with the chorus. 100% is a document which honest Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great war.

The road for Mr. Sinclair to travel is the road of irony and documentation, both of which will hold him back from ineffectual rages and thereby serve to enlarge his influence.  Such genius for controversy as his may be neither expected nor advised to look for quieter paths; it feels, with Bernard Shaw, that “if people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must.”  It is fair to say, however, that certain readers heartily sympathetic toward Mr. Sinclair observe in him a painful tendency to enjoy scandal for its own sake and to generalize from it to an extent which hurts his cause; observe in him a quite superfluous gusto when it comes to reporting bloody incidents not always contributory to any general design; observe in him a frequent over-use of the shout and the scream.  He has himself given an example—­100%—­on which such critical strictures are based; in that best of his novels as well as best of his arguments he has avoided most of his own defects.

A revolutionary novelist naturally finds it difficult to represent his world with the quiet grasp with which it can be represented by one who, accepting the present frame of life, has studied it curiously, affectionately, until it has left a firm, substantial image in the mind.  The revolutionist must see life as constantly whirling and melting under his gaze; he must bring to light many facts which the majority overlook but which it will seem to him like connivance with injustice to leave in hiding; he must go constantly beyond what is to what ought to be.  All the more reason, then, why he should be as watchful as the most watchful artist in his choice and use of the modes of his particular art.  It requires at least as much art to convert as to give pleasure.