I fancy, serenely indifferent to the instituted forms of society. He has not railed at society, with the satirists. He has been all absorbed in studying more perfect means for expressing the strange joy in the hearts of men and women when, at the ages of twenty, thirty, forty and upward, they suddenly resolve not to accept the world's price for tame acquiescence in its routine, not to "fall for" a standardized antemortem burial in respectability, but to strike out resolutely for a personal life and a deeper awareness of their own existence and its brief ripple in the coursing stream of humanity.
We should approach Mr. Anderson as the impassioned interpreter of day-dreams, the day-dreams of common people—newsboys, stableboys, washerwomen, farmhands, sign painters, drug clerks, old maids, small-town preachers, tub manufacturers, newspaper men, and women with nothing to do but to wait for their husbands to come home—the great masses of the plain people, in their occasional hours of revolt against what Stevenson declared is the destiny of most men: "leading lives of quiet despair." He has an intimate and quite extraordinary understanding of what goes on in American plain people when they are groping for an escape from "lives of quiet despair." Do you wish he would keep that understanding to himself or, at least, find some less disquieting way of uttering it? You don't like his symbols?
I suppose Mr. Anderson knows how a late-Victorian poet expressed his revolt against the enveloping grayness of drab lives, "faces of all emotion purged, from nothing into nothing urged." He imagined a mad king proclaiming: "I heard an angel crying from the sun for glory, for more glory on the earth." That
