that Mr. Tarkington may possibly have desired The Midlander to say something to us a little deeper than this. Under the surface humor, under the apparently superficial representation of character, there is a discoverable tragedy. I have said that Dan Oliphant, a various and lively youth, becomes at maturity a mere "megaphone" of his real estate business. He becomes the almost impersonal expansiveness of an ugly booming city. This explains the curious fact that the reader suffers little when Dan is checkmated and ejected from his own enterprise. All that was real in Dan is preserved in roads, factories and bungalows. He has lost all his private personality. The tragedy of the novel is precisely the defeat and extinction of his personal life. And that is the tragedy which, up to date, midwestern civilization has been fondest of inflicting upon its loyal pioneers.
Accept that view, and you have a kind of artistic defence of the thinness and deficient vitality of the characterizations. The true Midlander, perhaps the author would have us understand, is personally a thin, empty man. If Mr. Tarkington really meant to say all that, if our nonchalant and best-dressed novelist actually sauntered up to say anything as profoundly melancholy and disillusioning as that—well, he has said a "mouthful," and we must never trust these languidly jaunty fellows with light traveling bags any more! If it is true, then The Midlander isn't a nice novel at all.
