ek god"--beautiful and innocent beyond belief or
endurance. _The Turmoil_ is really not much more veracious, with its
ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes
verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of
capital almost overnight. Even _The Magnificent Ambersons_, with its
wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but
rounds out its narrative with a hasty regeneration. And what can a
critic say of such blatant nonsense as arises from the frenzy of
propaganda in _Ramsey Milholland_?

Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to
call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost
covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines
himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard
himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who
annually come back to a college to offer themselves--though this is not
their conscious purpose--as an object lesson in the loud triviality
peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however,
when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr.
Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending.

The author of _Penrod_, of _Penrod and Sam_, and of _Seventeen_ passes
for an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation been so
insecurely founded. What all these books primarily recall is the winks
that adults exchange over the heads of children who are minding their
own business, as the adults are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who
have forgotten the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only
its surface awkwardnesses. Real adolescence, like any other age of man,
has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities;
the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's tales is almost nothing but
farce--staged for outsiders. Not one of the characters is an individual;
they are all little monsters--amusing monsters, it is true--dressed up
to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments and the stock
affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the
middle teens. The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom
Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the
informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of "Silly Bill"
Baxter--at first diverting, it is also true--are exorbitantly multiplied
till reality drops out