Booth Tarkington is the glass of adolescence and the mold of Indiana.  The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in The Gentleman from Indiana, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the prairie on fire.  But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous, could not put up with failure in a hero.  So Harkless appears as a mine of latent splendors.  Carlow County idolizes him, evil-doers hate him, grateful old men worship him, devoted young men shadow his unsuspecting steps at night in order to protect him from the villains of Six-Cross-Roads, sweet girls adore him, fortune saves him from dire adventures, and in the end his fellow-voters choose him to represent their innumerable virtues in the Congress of their country without his even dreaming what affectionate game they are at.  This from the creator of Penrod, who at the comical age of twelve so often lays large plans for proving to the heedless world that he, too, has been a hero all along!  In somewhat happier hours Mr. Tarkington wrote Monsieur Beaucaire, that dainty romantic episode in the life of Prince Louis-Philippe de Valois, who masquerades as a barber and then as a gambler at Bath, is misjudged on the evidence of his own disguises, just escapes catastrophe, and in the end gracefully forgives the gentlemen and ladies who have been wrong, parting with an exquisite gesture from Lady Mary Carlisle, the beauty of Bath, who loves him but who for a few fatal days had doubted.  This from the creator of William Sylvanus Baxter, who at the preposterous age of seventeen imagines himself another Sydney Carton and after a silent, agonizing, condescending farewell goes out to the imaginary tumbril!

Just such postures and phantasms of adolescence lie behind all Mr. Tarkington’s more serious plots—­and not merely those earlier ones which he constructed a score of years ago when the mode in fiction was historical and rococo.  Van Revel in The Two Van Revels, convinced and passionate abolitionist, nevertheless becomes as hungry as any fire-eater of them all the moment Polk moves for war on Mexico, though to Van Revel the war is an evil madness.  In The Conquest of Canaan Louden plays Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. The Guest of Quesnay takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness, smashes his head in an automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of creature known as a “Greek god”—­beautiful and innocent beyond belief or endurance. The Turmoil is really not much more veracious, with its ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of capital almost overnight.  Even The Magnificent Ambersons, with its wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but rounds out its narrative with a hasty regeneration.  And what can a critic say of such blatant nonsense as arises from the frenzy of propaganda in Ramsey Milholland?