For instance, Carol Kennicott, the heroine, whenever she is overtaken by an emotional scene, is given to looking out at the nearest window to hide her feelings, whereupon the author goes to great lengths to describe just exactly what came within her range of vision.  Nothing escapes him, even to shreds of excelsior lying on the ground in back of Howland & Gould’s grocery store.

* * * * *

Let us suppose that Harriet Beecher Stowe had been endowed with Mr. Lewis’s gift for reporting and had indulged herself in it to the extent of the following in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin:” 

“Slowly Simon Legree raised his whip-arm to strike the prostrate body of the old negro.  As he did so his eye wandered across the plantation to the slaves’ quarters which crouched blistering in the sun.  Cowed as they were, as only ramshackle buildings can be cowed, they presented their gray boards, each eaten with four or five knot-holes, to the elements in abject submission.  The door of one hung loose by a rust-encased hinge, of which only one screw remained on duty, and that by sheer willpower of two or three threads.  Legree could not quite make out how many threads there were on the screw, but he guessed, and Simon Legree’s guess was nearly always right.  On the ground at the threshold lay a banjo G string, curled like a blond snake ready to strike at the reddish, brown inner husk of a nut of some sort which was blowing about within reach.  There were also several crumbs of corn-pone, well-done, a shred of tobacco which had fallen from the pipe of some negro slave before the fire had consumed more than its very tip, an old shoe which had, Legree noticed by the maker’s name, been bought in Boston in its palmier days, doubtless by a Yankee cousin of one of Uncle Tom’s former owners, and an indiscriminate pile of old second editions of a Richmond newspaper, sweet-potato peelings and seeds of unripe watermelons.

“Swish!  The blow descended on the crouching form of Uncle Tom.”

* * * * *

Or Sir Walter Scott: 

“Sadly Rowena turned from her lover’s side and looked out over the courtyard of the castle.  Beneath her she saw the cobble-stones all scratched and marred with gray bruises from the horses’ hoofs, a faded purple ribbon dropped from the mandolin of a minstrel, three slightly imperfect wassails and a trencher with a nick on the rim, all that had not been used of the wild boar at last night’s feast, a peach-stone like a wrinkled almond nestling in a sardine tin.  Slowly she faced her knight: 

“‘Prithee,’ she said.”

* * * * *

And I am not at all sure that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Ivanhoe” wouldn’t have made better reading if they had lapsed into the photographic at times.  Mr. Lewis may overdo it, but I expect to re-read “Main Street” some day, and that is more encouragement than I can hold out to Mrs. Stowe or Sir Walter Scott.