In no sense, of course, does he assume the cosmopolitan and international attitude which most of the naturalists assume:  “Provincialism,” he curtly says, “is the best thing in the world.”  Nor is he in any of the casual senses a radical:  “In everything in which man is interested, the world knows what is best for him....  Millions of men have lived millions of years, and tried everything.”  Neither has he any patience with speculation for its own sake:  “There are no mysteries.  Where does the wind come from?  It doesn’t matter:  we know the habits of wind after it arrives.”  As to politics:  “The people are always worsted in an election.”  As to altruism:  “The long and the short of it is, whoever catches the fool first is entitled to shear him.”  As to love:  “We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as we do around pigs.”  As to money:  “In theory, it is not respectable to be rich.  In fact, poverty is a disgrace.”  As to literature:  “Poets are prophets whose prophesying never comes true.”  As to prudence:  “Trying to live a spiritual life in a material world is the greatest folly I know anything about.”  As to persistent hopefulness:  “Pessimism is always nearer the truth than optimism.”

When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and the directness of a bullet.  His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living.  He had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility.  He made no specialty of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let pathology alone.  He appears in the book to be—­as he is in the flesh—­a wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits of decent, illuminating gossip.  He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble with a cynical inquiry.

Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it.  The common sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy—­“If it isn’t common sense, it isn’t philosophy”—­he has the gift of expounding in a language which is piercingly individual.  It strips his village of trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms—­making it out a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable.  His village is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no village ever was; at least he has never seen one