like that.  Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson.  If Mr. Howe is less vivid than those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter and surer.  “I am not an Agnostic; I know....  I have lived a long time, and my real problems have always been simple.”

Sinclair Lewis

Spoon River Anthology was a collection of poems, Winesburg, Ohio was a collection of short stories, The Anthology of Another Town was a collection of anecdotes.  It remained for a novel in the customary form, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, to bring to hundreds of thousands the protest against the village which these books brought to thousands.

Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Masters, clearly has revenges to take upon the narrow community in which he grew up, nourished, no doubt, on the complacency native to such neighborhoods and yet increasingly resentful.  Less poetical than his predecessor, the younger novelist went further in both his specifications and his generalizations.  Instead of brooding closely, ironically, profoundly, under the black wings of the thought of death, Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher Prairie done to the life with the fingers of ridicule.  He has photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace.  Each item of his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible.  No other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail in any other American novel.  Various elements of scandal crop out here and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against his village—­and indeed against all villages—­is that of being dull.  “It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking.  It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue.  It is the prohibition of happiness.  It is slavery self-sought and self-defended.  It is dulness made God.”

Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses this satirist.  The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the individual colors and graces and prides and habits flee—­or would flee if there were any asylum still uninvaded.  Thus Mr. Lewis’s voice continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which went on during their century.  The American voice, however, speaks of American conditions.  The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates, have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now, grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by the booster’s calliope and the evangelist’s bass drum, farther than it has ever gone before—­to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their own defense.