This Side of Paradise comes to no conclusion; it ends in weariness and smoke, though at last Amory believes he has found himself in the midst of a wilderness of uncertainties.  Yet how vivid a document the book is upon a whirling time, and how beguiling an entertainment!  The narrative flares up now into delightful verse and now into glittering comic dialogue.  It shifts from passion to farce, from satire to lustrous beauty, from impudent knowingness to pathetic youthful humility.  It is both alive and lively.  Few things more significantly illustrate the moving tide of which the revolt from the village is a symptom than the presence of such unrest as this among these bright barbarians.  The traditions which once might have governed them no longer hold.  They break the patterns one by one and follow their wild desires.  And as they play among the ruins of the old, they reason randomly about the new, laughing.

Dorothy Canfield

If Floyd Dell seems in The Briary-Bush to hint at the human necessity to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in The Brimming Cup pretty clearly argues for that necessity.  Doubtless it is to go too far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed by the radical outbursts of 1920.  Already in The Squirrel Cage and The Bent Twig she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of households in small communities; and in Hillsboro People she had added another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in fiction. The Brimming Cup sounded a deeper note than any she had yet struck.  Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her children to seek joy in a thrilling passion.

Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument stumbles lamentably.  The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise’s life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she contemplates.  Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love:  it is only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting instability; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have been had the conflict