Harvey O'Higgins (1876) has not sought romantic escape himself, but he has analyzed with scientific accuracy many cases of it in American life. His imaginary biographies of eminent Americans are keen and tender in their insight, and I esteem them highly as a brilliant diagnosis of our spiritual symptoms. They are set down in meticulous detail by a fine reporter who has learned something from Defoe and all the rest from life.

Achmed Abdullah (1881 -) provides two sorts of romantic escape. The ephemeral outlet is through gratifying the public thirst for sensation at any cost. The finer outlet is in satisfying his own nostalgia for Asia and interpreting with much of Kipling's vivid sense of color and odor that noble Eastern life of elemental things to which Kipling has given false values which Abdullah silently corrects.

sentimentalizes that

John Russell (1885 reality and only redeems himself because he is a fine raconteur. Charles J. Finger (1871 —), on the other hand, tells us traveler's tales of equal wonder, but invests them with dignity as a spiritual adventure.

Finally, Jeanette Marks (1875

recurs to

the old New England form of romantic escape

through transcendentalism, and in The Sun-Chaser and Old Lady Hudson we have the Indian summer of Hawthorne lingering on with a touch of frost in fragile delicacy.

Here romantic escape passes perihelion, and the course of the short story returns to temporal things in order to regard them more searchingly. Edna Bryner and Frederick Booth and others point the way to Sherwood Anderson, while Konrad Bercovici with his elemental tales of gypsy life leads romantics home by releasing their inhibitions and facing reality in what is a strange environment to his public.

CHAPTER XVI

SHERWOOD ANDERSON AND WALDO FRANK

AN English critic has recently pointed out that whenever the craft of story-telling has attained high mechanical efficiency, there has been a necessary reaction. After Maupassant came Chekhov, for example, and so in England after Kipling comes Katherine Mansfield, and in America after "O. Henry" comes Sherwood Anderson.

This revolt against mechanical technique, so far as Anderson is concerned, is only the sign of a much more profound revolt in him which has attained both gentleness and outward serenity. It is the revolt against a dull conformity which custom has staled, a conformity based upon the principle of leveling down rather than leveling up, a conformity of negation rather than of healthy growth. Anderson meets it with a quiet convincing smile and a firm, but gentle "Non Possumus."

He challenges the general assumed validity of that New England puritanism, which is moribund

in New England, but which traveled to the Middle West with the settlers from the Atlantic seaboard, and became so firmly rooted in the soil that it only grew more sturdily in the industrialized and mechanized civilization which followed pioneer life in this part of America. Anderson's criticism is valid for the whole of the United States, but it is specially illustrated by this Ohio and Indiana and Illinois country which he knows so well.

A complete account of Sherwood Anderson's achievement would require a discussion of his novels and poems and critical articles, but these do not concern us here, and a reader of Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg will find that these two collections sufficiently indicate Mr. Anderson's purpose and measure the success of its fulfillment.

His short stories are studies in the sensitivity of a tired people stirring with the first hints of a new and freer life. They are feeling and testing little points of contact by thrusting forward spiritual antennæ timidly, but with infinite care, and they are more or less subconsciously relating these points of contact to one another and to themselves, little by little and by a process of trial and error. The errors far outnumber the correct in

ferences, but errors are memorable experiences and more instructive often than successful intuitions. These people feel an obscure, but terrible desire for self-expression, and their attempts at expression are limited and frustrated by their religious symbols and by their conventional ethical and commercial codes. Business provides almost the only romantic escape from life, as Dreiser anticipated Anderson in pointing out, yet business with its emphasis on power rather than love is not an adequate spiritual outlet for all this pent-up energy. And so men and women are defeated by life and ashamed of their defeat, and deep down in their hearts they have a sense of injustice, and they want to know why.

Anderson's stories are all crises, yet indeterminate in their immediate significance as life always appears to be at the moment of incidence. Frequently he gives these crises no more outward emphasis than life gives them, but we are enabled to chart life's course backwards and forwards from the viewpoint of this observer, since we are not personally implicated in the tangle, and survey it with Anderson from a dispassionate, though perfectly sympathetic, distance.

Thoreau has remarked on some occasion that