Mr. Poole, one hates to have to say, is frequently rather less than serious:  he is earnest; at moments he is hardly better than merely solemn.  Nevertheless, The Harbor and His Family—­His Family easily the better of the two—­are works of honest art and excellent documents upon a generation.  Mr. Poole feels the earth reeling beneath the desperate feet of men; he sees the millions who are hopelessly bewildered; he hears the cries of rage and fear coming from those who foretell chaos; he catches the exaltation of those who imagine that after so long a shadow the sunshine of freedom and justice will shortly break upon them.  With many generous expectations he waits for the revolution which shall begin the healing of the world’s wounds.  Meanwhile he paints the dissolving lineaments of the time in colors which his own softness keeps from being very stern or very deep but which are gentle and appealing.

Henry B. Fuller

The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of Henry B. Fuller lie in his faithful habit of being a dilettante.  A generation ago, when the aesthetic poets and critics were in bloom, Mr. Fuller in The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani and The Chatelaine of La Trinite played with sentimental pilgrimages in Italy or the Alps, packing his narratives with the most affectionate kind of archaeology and yet forever scrutinizing them with a Yankee smile.  A little later, when Howells’s followers had become more numerous, Mr. Fuller joined them with minute, accurate, amused representations of Chicago in The Cliff-Dwellers and With the Procession.  Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as conducted in Chicago—­Under the Skylights—­and of Americans traveling in Europe—­From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others.  After Spoon River Anthology Mr. Fuller took such hints from its method as he needed in the pungent dramatic sketches of Lines Long and Short.  One of these sketches, called Postponement, has autobiography, it may be guessed, in its ironic, wistful record of a Midwestern American who all his life longed and planned to live in Europe but who found himself ready to gratify his desire only in the dread summer of 1914, when peace departed from the earth to stay away, he saw, at least as long as he could hope to live.  There is the note of intimate experience, if not of autobiography, in these lucid words spoken about the hero of On the Stairs:  “he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself in.  An entangling, ruinous paradox.”