ination which explores with equal success the small mind of Mr. Wrenn superheated in a sales campaign, and the psychology of a frustrated art student from California, cursed by ambition without power. And here finally is a point of view, detached, critical, illumined by the comic spirit—a point of view from which the romantic hunger of Mr. Wrenn and his kind, and the artistic and intellectual aspirations of the girl with red hair and her kind, can be treated with that "mixture of love and wit," which Thackeray declares is the essence of humor. Says Istra Nash to Mr. Wrenn, speaking of the Bohemians: "Being Free, of course they're not allowed to go and play with nice people, for when a person is Free, you know, he is never free to be anything but Free." It is a sentence indicative of that early maturing of the critical faculty which distinguishes the first novel of Mr. Lewis from, let us say, the first novel of Mr. Floyd Dell.
His second book, The Trail of the Hawk, 1915, is dedicated to "the optimistic rebels (including his present publisher), through whose talk at luncheon the author watches the many-colored spectacle of life." It is on the surface a story about one of the earlier successful American aviators; but I find, under this curious disguise, the nearest approach that Mr. Lewis has yet made to an "autobiographical" novel, to a revelation of the motives and the influences which have shaped his own career. The imaginative progeny of the realist is, of course, usually related in some fashion to the seven wrestlers
