and he sees it still flowing or whirling, he steadily
sharpens his outlines and perfects the fierce intensity of his style.
Will his wisdom ever catch up with his passion and his observation? In
each successive book he has revealed himself as still hot with the fever
of his day's experiences. He has yet to show that he can go through the
confusion of new spiritual adventures and then set them down,
remembering, in tranquillity.

_E.W. Howe_

With _The Anthology of Another Town_ E.W. Howe, obviously on the
suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American
village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in _The Story of a
Country Town_ almost forty years before. Then he had been young enough
to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale,
somewhat as Emily Bronte under somewhat similar circumstances has done
for _Wuthering Heights_--the novel which Mr. Howe's story most
resembles. But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful
dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life
which sweetened the decade of the eighties. Even among the pioneers whom
Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness
and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the
new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for
passion or violence, into the easy vices: idleness, whining, gossip,
drunkenness, sodden inutility. Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from
the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a
Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces. Having
apparently come to the conclusion that he was a failure as a novelist
because he made no great stir with his experiments in that trade, he
confined himself to more or less orthodox journalism for a generation,
and then, retiring, founded his organ of "indignation and
information"--_E.W. Howe's Monthly_--and began to pour forth the stream
of aphoristic honesty which makes him easily first among the rural
sages.

In no sense, of course, does he assume the cosmopolitan and
international attitude which most of the naturalists assume:
"Provincialism," he curtly says, "is the best thing in the world." Nor
is he in any of the casual senses a radical: "In everything in which man
is interested, the world knows what is best for him.... Millions of men
have lived millions of years, and tried everything." Neither has he any
pati