THE most fascinating aspect of American life to-day is the ascent into articulate self-consciousness of that element of our people which Emerson called "the Jacksonian rabble," and the relative decline toward artistic inexpressiveness of that element which Barrett Wendell called the "better sort." I have been reading two recent biographies which, taken together, give one the personal significance and intimate human meaning of this phenomenon. The first records the rise of a Mid-Western waif to success in business, and then his soul-shattering discovery that he is the typical American of our day, and that he is under a kind of divine obligation to become an artist and to reveal his soul in art. I refer to Sherwood Anderson's "A Story Teller's Story," a beautiful book, moving and significant. The second biography records the rise of a well-derived, well-bred Boston boy to be a professor of English at Harvard, and then his gradually strengthening conviction that he is the last of the New England gentlemen—a sobering and saddening thought, mitigated in his case by his belief that a hundred years hence, if all goes well with the Republic, the typical American will be such a man as he has been. I refer to Mr. Howe's life of Barrett Wendell, which is likewise a beautiful book, moving and significant.
