Floyd Dell

The year which saw the appearance of Main Street and Miss Lulu Bett saw also that of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s acid delineation of the village of Manhattan in the genteel seventies, given over to the “innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience”; saw Mary Borden’s The Romantic Woman, with its cosmopolitan amusement at the village of Iroquois, otherwise Chicago; and saw Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, which, standing on the other side of controversy, lacks not only the disposition to sentimentalize the village but even the disposition to ridicule it.

Mr. Dell’s emancipation is the fruit of a revolutionary detachment from village standards which is too complete to have left traces of any such rupture as is implied in almost every paragraph of Main Street. Moon-Calf, recounting the adventures of a young poet in certain river counties and towns and villages of Illinois, touches without heat upon the spiritual and intellectual limitations of those neighborhoods.  It settles no old scores.  It relates an unconventional career without conventional reproaches and also without conventional heroics.  Felix Fay dreams and blunders and suffers but he goes on growing like a tree, pushing his head up through one level of development after another until he stands above the minor annoyances of his immaturity and looks out over a broader world.  He has a soul which is naturally socialist and yet he never loses himself in proclamations or statistics.  He can be fresh and hopeful and yet learn from the remarkable old men he encounters.  He lives and loves with an instinctive freedom and yet he holds himself equally secure from devastating extravagances and devastating repressions.  Mr. Dell writes as if he had steadier nerves than most of the naturalists; as if he regarded their war upon the village as an ancient brawl which may now be assumed to have been as much settled as it ever will be.  At least, it seems scarcely worth wrangling over.  The spirit seeking to release itself from trivial conditions behaves most intelligently when it discreetly takes them into account and concerns itself with them only enough to escape entanglements.  Mr. Dell leaves it to the moralists and the satirists to whip offenders, while he himself goes on to construct some monument of beauty upon the ground which moralism and satire are laboring to clear.

Moon-Calf is very beautiful.  Felix has a poetic gift sufficient to warm the record with fine verses and delicate susceptibilities upon which his adventures leave exquisite impressions.  Even when his rebellion is at its highest pitch he wastes little energy in hating and so avoids the astringency and perturbation of a state of mind which is always perilous.  To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points.  But were it entirely invention it would