e of affairs in Chicago, where
fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where
the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of
seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil.
Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed,
he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does,
with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from
farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure
which Americans take in Europe. But Chicago is the true center of his
universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring
village so rapidly turned town. He has not, however, been blown with the
prevailing winds. The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens
has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage. Something
in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk
with opportunity.

Is it the scholar in him, or the New Englander, or the moralist which
has compelled him to count the moral cost of material expansion? In the
first of his novels to win much of a hearing, _The Common Lot_, he
studies the career of an architect who becomes involved in the frauds of
dishonest builders and sacrifices his professional integrity for the
sake of quick, dangerous profits. _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_,
a precious document now too much neglected, follows a country youth of
good initial impulses through his rise and progress among the packers
and on to the Senate of the United States. This is one of the oldest
themes in literature, one of the themes most certain to succeed with any
public: Dick Whittington, the Industrious Apprentice, over again. Mr.
Herrick, however, cannot merely repeat the old drama or point the old
moral. His hero wriggles upward by devious ways and sharp practices,
crushing competitors, diverting justice, and gradually paying for his
fortune with his integrity. In the most modern idiom Mr. Herrick asks
again and again the ancient question whether the whole world is worth as
much as a man's soul.

That mystical rigor which permits but one answer to the question
suggests to Mr. Herrick two avenues of cure from the evils accompanying
the disease he broods upon. One is a return to simple living under
conditions which quiet the restless nerves, allay the greedy appetites,
and restore the central will. The Master in _The Master o