and youth. So, almost simultaneously with "McTeague," Mr. Norris
published "Blix," another San Francisco story, as short as
"McTeague" was lengthy, as light as "McTeague" was heavy, as poetic
and graceful as "McTeague" was somber and charmless. Here is a man
worth waiting on; a man who is both realist and poet, a man who can
teach

"Not only by a comet's rush,
But by a rose's birth."

Yet unlike as they are, in both books the source of power is the
same, and, for that matter, it was even the same in his first book,
"Moran of the Lady Letty." Mr. Norris has dispensed with the
conventional symbols that have crept into art, with the trite,
half-truths and circumlocutions, and got back to the physical basis
of things. He has abjured tea-table psychology, and the analysis of
figures in the carpet and subtile dissections of intellectual
impotencies, and the diverting game of words and the whole
literature of the nerves. He is big and warm and sometimes brutal,
and the strength of the soil comes up to him with very little loss
in the transmission. His art strikes deep down into the roots of
life and the foundation of Things as They Are--not as we tell each
other they are at the tea-table. But he is realistic art, not
artistic realism. He is courageous, but he is without bravado.

He sees things freshly, as though they had not been seen before, and
describes them with singular directness and vividness, not with
morbid acuteness, with a large, wholesome joy of life. Nowhere is
this more evident than in his insistent use of environment. I recall
the passage in which he describes the street in which McTeague
lives. He represents that street as it is on Sunday, as it is on
working days, as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are going
out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock when
the women are out marketing among the small shopkeepers, as it is at
night when the shop girls are out with the soda fountain tenders and
the motor cars dash by full of theater-goers, and the Salvationists
sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he reproduces in
detail the life in a by-street of a great city, the little tragedy
of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of handling
environment--most of them bad. When a young author has very little
to say and no story worth telling, he resorts to environment. It is
frequently used to disguise a weakness of structure, as ladies who
paint landscapes put their