rhythm of marching there is something which to his chaos-maddened soul is profoundly right.
Hugh McVey, the inventor in "Poor White," 1920, runs away from his bride, leaps from the window to avoid her embrace.
Webster, the tub manufacturer in "Many Marriages," 1923, runs away from his wife and his business—elopes in the dusk of the morning with his stenographer; and when this novel appeared Mr. Canby made something of a sensation by comparing Webster's flight with the departure of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress" from the City of Destruction.
The shorter tales, "Winesburg, Ohio," 1919; "The Triumph of the Egg," 1921, and "Horses and Men," 1923, are filled with restless fugitives. Images of escape hitherto have been the dominating shapes in Mr. Anderson's imagination, and for reasons some of which are now obvious.
The central fact in his life, when you come to understand it, is this: Till he was nearly forty years old he was engrossed in the all-American game of getting on in the world. He was in the "advertising game"—making it go, too, one understands—why not? with that Cæsarian chin, that rudder-like nose, those devouring eyes. But midway in this mortal life he walked out of business into art. Midway in life he had the sort of experience which makes the crisis in many of Tolstoy's novels—a kind of uprushing profound despair over the oppressive emptiness of his busy, successful existence, a kind of desperate need of finding some soul-satisfying meaning in the clangorous scheme of things. He had the Dantean experience of losing his way in an "obscure wood" and meeting a "lion" which drove him from his path, drove him in
