regions of his mind and is consequently more humane and less doctrinaire than his earlier novels.  It has a similar superiority over the book he wrote for 1920, Poor White, which returns to the device of a bewildered strong man rising from a dull obscurity, successful but unsatisfied.  At the same time Poor White proceeds from an imagination which had been warmed with the creation of Winesburg and its people and is richer, fuller, deeper than the angular sagas of McPherson and McGregor.  It does not yet show that Mr. Anderson can construct a large plot or that his vision comes with a steady gleam; it shows, rather, that he is still fumbling in the confusion of current life to get hold of something true and simple and to make it clear.

Perhaps he tried in Poor White to manipulate a larger bulk than he is yet ready for.  Perhaps because he was aware of that he has worked in his latest book, The Triumph of the Egg, with a variety of brief themes and has excelled even Winesburg in both poetry and truth.  At least it is certain that he keeps on advancing in his art.  Although life has not hardened for him, and he sees it still flowing or whirling, he steadily sharpens his outlines and perfects the fierce intensity of his style.  Will his wisdom ever catch up with his passion and his observation?  In each successive book he has revealed himself as still hot with the fever of his day’s experiences.  He has yet to show that he can go through the confusion of new spiritual adventures and then set them down, remembering, in tranquillity.

E.W.  Howe

With The Anthology of Another Town E.W.  Howe, obviously on the suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in The Story of a Country Town almost forty years before.  Then he had been young enough to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale, somewhat as Emily Bronte under somewhat similar circumstances has done for Wuthering Heights—­the novel which Mr. Howe’s story most resembles.  But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life which sweetened the decade of the eighties.  Even among the pioneers whom Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for passion or violence, into the easy vices:  idleness, whining, gossip, drunkenness, sodden inutility.  Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces.  Having apparently come to the conclusion that he was a failure as a novelist because he made no great stir with his experiments in that trade, he confined himself to more or less orthodox journalism for a generation, and then, retiring, founded his organ of “indignation and information”—­E.W.  Howe’s Monthly—­and began to pour forth the stream of aphoristic honesty which makes him easily first among the rural sages.