Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and play and love—­another conquest of a larger Canaan.  Here are fused American hope and Russian honesty.  At the end David, with all his New World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of Old World integrity and faith.  And yet the novel is very quiet in its polemic.  Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on.  Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength.

The fact that Mr. Cahan wrote David Levinsky not in his mother-tongue but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that American literature no less than the American population is being enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods.  The methods of the Yiddish writers are, as might be expected, those of Russian fiction generally, though in this they were anticipated by the critical arguments of Howells and Henry James and are rivaled by the majority of the naturalistic novelists.  Their materials, as might not be expected, have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty.  The older Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry of the newcomers.  They are less direct and more provincial; they are bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behind old-fashioned reticences which soften the drama of their lives.  With the newer stocks an ancient process begins again.  Their affairs are conducted on the plane of desperate subsistence.  Struggling to survive at all, they cry out in the language of hunger and death; almost naked in the struggle, they speak nakedly about livelihood and birth and death.  Sooner or later the immigrants must be perceived to have added precious elements of passion and candor to American fiction.

2.  THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE

Edgar Lee Masters

The newest style in American fiction dates from the appearance, in 1915, of Spoon River Anthology, though it required five years for the influence of that book to pass thoroughly over from poetry to prose.  For nearly half a century native literature had been faithful to the cult of the village, celebrating its delicate merits with sentimental affection and with unwearied interest digging into odd corners of the country for persons and incidents illustrative of the essential goodness and heroism which, so the doctrine ran, lie beneath unexciting surfaces.  Certain critical dispositions, aware of agrarian discontent or given to a preference for cities, might now and then lay disrespectful hands upon the life of the farm; but even these generally hesitated to touch the village, sacred since Goldsmith in spite of Crabbe, sacred since Washington Irving in spite of E.W.  Howe.