seek to use powers that have been denied, starved, suppressed. They seek to make the voice of contemporary letters adequately express the color and passion of contemporary life. Perhaps I should add that with the general purpose of the movement, as here stated, I am heart and soul in sympathy, however impatiently I may have contemplated some of its bungling preliminary operations.
To this movement Sherwood Anderson brings a number of gifts, some of which were not abundant in it before his arrival, gifts which should be of inestimable service to it. I don't really know where to begin enumerating them nor which of them to single out as his prime distinction. But I rather think it is an allotropic form of the religious spirit which particularly appeals to me in him. It is something inward, close to his heart, regulating his other powers, and giving edge and intensity to his perceptions.
Externalized, this central passion signally flames forth in his white-hot zeal for craftsmanship. This Midwestern ex-advertising man with the inscrutable poker-player's face is down on his knees, is in sackcloth and ashes, is shattered and in tears when he finds himself in the presence of superbly perfect workmanship. The man is in love, desperately in love, with perfection. And that passion puts humility into his heart, and grace, and reverence, and the fragrance of adoration. That is one gift.
Another is that he possesses the idiom of American colloquial speech beyond most living writers—Ring Lardner perhaps excepted; and he has had the tact and the taste and the patience to work with the colloquial idiom and the colloquial tune till he has lifted them above the level of slang and made of them a
