Conventional readers had the thrill of being shocked and of finding an opportunity to defend the customary reticences; ironical readers had the delight of coming upon a host of witnesses to the contrast which irony perpetually observes between appearance and reality; readers militant for the “truth” discovered an occasion to demand that pious fictions should be done away with and the naked facts exposed to the sanative glare of noon.  And all these readers, most of them unconsciously no doubt, shared the fearful joy of sitting down at an almost incomparably abundant feast of scandal.  Where now were the mild decencies of Tiverton, of Old Chester, of Friendship Village?  The roofs and walls of Spoon River were gone and the passers-by saw into every bedroom; the closets were open and all the skeletons rattled undenied; brains and breasts had unlocked themselves and set their most private treasures out for the most public gaze.

It was the scandal and not the poetry of Spoon River, criticism may suspect, which particularly spread its fame.  Mr. Masters used an especial candor in affairs of sex, an instinct which, secretive everywhere, has rarely ever been so much so as in the American villages of fiction, where love ordinarily exhibited itself in none but the chastest phases, as if it knew no savage vagaries, transgressed no ordinances, shook no souls out of the approved routines.  Reaction from too much sweet drove Mr. Masters naturally to too much sour; sex in Spoon River slinks and festers, as if it were an instinct which had not been schooled—­however imperfectly—­by thousands of years of human society to some modification of its rages and some civil direction of its restless power.  But here, as with the other aspects of behavior in his village, he showed himself impatient, indeed violent, toward all subterfuges.  There is filth, he said in effect, behind whited sepulchers; drag it into the light and such illusions will no longer trick the uninstructed into paying honor where no honor appertains and will no longer beckon the deluded to an imitation of careers which are actually unworthy.

Spoon River has not even the outward comeliness which the village of tradition should possess:  it is slack and shabby.  Nor is its decay chronicled in any mood of tender pathos.  What strikes its chronicler most is the general demoralization of the town.  Except for a few saints and poets, whom he acclaims with a lyric ardor, the population is sunk in greed and hypocrisy and—­as if this were actually the worst of all—­complacent apathy.  Spiritually it dwindles and rots; externally it clings to a pitiless decorum which veils its faults and almost makes it overlook them, so great has the breach come to be between its practices and its professions.  Again and again its poet goes back to the heroic founders of Spoon River, back to the days which nurtured Lincoln, whose shadow lies mighty, beneficent, too often unheeded, over the degenerate sons and daughters of a smaller day; and from an older, robuster integrity Mr. Masters takes a standard by which he morosely measures the purposelessness and furtiveness and supineness and dulness of the village which has forgotten its true ancestors.