to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final chapters of his career as here recorded, but no one knows what will come of it—­they advance and wheel and retreat as blindly as any horde of peasants bound for a war about which they do not know the causes, in a distant country of which they have never heard the name.  Mr. Anderson worked in his first books as if he were assembling documents on the eve of revolution.  Village peace and stability have departed; ancient customs break or fade; the leaven of change stirs the lump.

From such arguments he turned aside to follow Mr. Masters into verse with Mid-American Chants and into scandal with Winesburg, Ohio.  But touching scandal with beauty as his predecessor touched it with irony, Mr. Anderson constantly transmutes it.  The young man who here sets out to make his fortune has not greatly hated Winesburg, and the imminence of his departure throws a vaguely golden mist over the village, which is seen in considerable measure through his generous if inexperienced eyes.  A newspaper reporter, he directs his principal curiosity towards items of life outside the commonplace and thus offers Mr. Anderson the occasion to explore the moral and spiritual hinterlands of men and women who outwardly walk paths strict enough.

If the life of the tribe is unadventurous, he seems to say, there is still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through pathless space.  Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort human spirits into grotesque forms.  The inhabitants of Winesburg tend toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse.  They see visions which in some wider world might become wholesome realities or might be dispelled by the light but which in Winesburg must lurk about till they master and madden with the strength which the darkness gives them.  Religion, deprived in Winesburg of poetry, fritters its time away over Pharisaic ordinances or evaporates in cloudy dreams; sex, deprived of spontaneity, settles into fleshly habit or tortures its victim with the malice of a thwarted devil; heroism of deed or thought either withers into melancholy inaction or else protects itself with a sullen or ridiculous bravado.

Yet even among such pitiful surroundings Mr. Anderson walks tenderly.  He honors youth, he feels beauty, he understands virtue, he trusts wisdom, when he comes upon them.  He broods over his creatures with affection, though he makes no luxury of illusions.  Much as he has detached himself from the cult of the village, he still cherishes the memories of some specific Winesburg.  Much as he has detached himself from the hazy national optimism of an elder style in American thinking, he still cherishes a confidence in particular persons. Winesburg, Ohio springs from the more intimate