One has but to recall Schnitzler's writings to realize with what a fleeting and delicate touch perilous motives of this kind may be suggested without offence to one's credulity or taste. And in a passage where Mr Anderson writes of the decay and corruption which ceaselessly attack life we can hardly be mistaken in detecting a resemblance to a recurring conception and manner of Mr D. H. Lawrence's, although the American author lacks just that vulture-like sharpness of insight which enables his English contemporary to arrive so often at expression, prey clutched firmly in carrion claw. It is only in turning to his short stories that we experience a grateful though guarded relief. In his Winesburg, Ohio, and The Triumph of the Egg he has recorded in varying situations the obscure emotional states of people, wistful, restless, or maladjusted to the crass routines of life, people who do sudden strange things seeking release for thwarted desires, people who have clung lingeringly to old "pure" ideals as they passed over the puberty into a world too raw for their troubled timidities. Why does one feel, however, that these stories in spite of their eloquent reply to Main Street, in spite of their occasional charm and originality, their gentleness and pity, never fully achieve art? One has but to compare even so moving and poetically conceived a story as The New Englander to de Maupassant's Miss Harriet, of similar theme, or Senility, so like Chekhov in conception, to one of that author's delicate masterpieces, to perceive the difference between writing weakened by a groping intellect and writing that arrives radiant and ineluctable from the pens of great imaginative artists. Even Mr Theodore Dreiser, with whose name that of Mr Anderson's has been so often associated, achieves in his brooding candour a freedom from the dragging weight of self-consciousness. "I am a confused child in a confused world" writes Mr Anderson in his Mid-American Chants, but it is not from confused children, however engaging they may be, that one looks for art. And with what banalities he is content to fill his pages—"she is fine and purposeful"—"hungry to the roots of her"—"He had lived clean body and mind"—"filled with the white wonder of it."
Then why, one asks oneself, in spite of so many lapses, so much obvious awkwardness in the handling of his material, so little understanding of how the minds of certain women work under circumstances of repression, so much rhetorical self-indulgence and
