races and prides and habits flee--or would flee
if there were any asylum still uninvaded. Thus Mr. Lewis's voice
continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a
railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew
Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which
went on during their century. The American voice, however, speaks of
American conditions. The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates,
have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now,
grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by
the booster's calliope and the evangelist's bass drum, farther than it
has ever gone before--to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all
the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their
own defense.

Mr. Lewis hates such dulness--the village virus--as the saints hate sin.
Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his
contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which
certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger
helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the
author of _Main Street_ through the laborious compilation of those
brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and
which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly
concerned in his crusade. The question, of course, arises whether the
ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than
the equally ancient war upon sin. Both narrow themselves to doctrinal
contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being
virtuous or being intelligent is but a half--or thereabouts--of
existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined. There
are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue
too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of
intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is
enough to make them fit for fiction. Mr. Lewis must be thought of as
sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with
the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic _Spoon
River_ rather than the later, calmer, loftier.

Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of
literature. Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have
written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the