Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington’s plots sophomoric than to call them adolescent.  Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who annually come back to a college to offer themselves—­though this is not their conscious purpose—­as an object lesson in the loud triviality peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion.  Adolescence, however, when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending.

The author of Penrod, of Penrod and Sam, and of Seventeen passes for an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation been so insecurely founded.  What all these books primarily recall is the winks that adults exchange over the heads of children who are minding their own business, as the adults are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who have forgotten the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only its surface awkwardnesses.  Real adolescence, like any other age of man, has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities; the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington’s tales is almost nothing but farce—­staged for outsiders.  Not one of the characters is an individual; they are all little monsters—­amusing monsters, it is true—­dressed up to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments and the stock affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the middle teens.  The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the informing imagination lent by Mark Twain.  The sighs of “Silly Bill” Baxter—­at first diverting, it is also true—­are exorbitantly multiplied till reality drops out of the semblance.  Calf-love does not always remain a joke merely because there are mature spectators to stand by nudging one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes its least experienced victims.  Those knowing asides which accompany these juvenile records have been mistaken too often for shrewd, even for profound, analyses of human nature.  Actually they are only knowing, as sophomores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few years.  In contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington is the perennial sophomore.

If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and Princeton, so also may he be said never to have outgrown Indiana.  In any larger sense, of course, he has not needed to.  A novelist does not require a universe in which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently perceptive eye, in any village.  Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord; Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself moving.  But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious attitude of the booster.