Now this causes the more regret for the reason that he has what is next best to character in a novelist—­that is, knack.  He has the knack of romance when he wants to employ it:  a light, allusive manner; a sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the “properties” thereto pertaining—­frills, ruffs, rapiers, insinuation; a considerable expertness in the ways of the “world”; gay colors, swift moods, the note of tender elegy.  He has also the knack of satire, which he employs more frequently than romance.  With what a rapid, joyous, accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in “the Midland town”!  How quickly he catches the first gesture of affectation and how deftly he sets it forth, entertained and entertaining!  From the chuckling exordium of The Magnificent Ambersons it is but a step to The Age of Innocence and Main Street.  Little reflective as he has allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, “thickness.”  He has movement, he has energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he has the leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to.  And, unlike those dozens of living American writers who once each wrote one good book and then lapsed into dull oblivion or duller repetition, he has traveled a long way from the methods of his greener days.

Why then does he continue to trifle with his thread-bare adolescents, as if he were afraid to write candidly about his coevals?  Why does he drift with the sentimental tide and make propaganda for provincial complacency?  He must know better.  He can do better.

February 1921.

POSTSCRIPT.—­He has done better.  Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in Alice Adams held himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant book.  Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears to be.  Desire, in any of the deeper senses, she shows no signs of feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and actually his assured position and his assured prosperity.  So considered, her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than human customs happen to approve.  But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one touch more of exaggeration.  He understands that Alice’s instinct to win a husband is an instinct as powerful as any that she has and is all that she has been taught by her society to have.  In his handling she becomes important; her struggle, without the aid of guardian dowager or beguiling dot, becomes increasingly pathetic as the narrative advances; and her eventual failure, though signalized merely by her resolution to desert the inhospitable circles of privilege for the wider universe of work, carries with it the sting of tragedy.