nce when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a
sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the
"properties" thereto pertaining--frills, ruffs, rapiers, insinuation; a
considerable expertness in the ways of the "world"; gay colors, swift
moods, the note of tender elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which
he employs more frequently than romance. With what a rapid, joyous,
accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in "the Midland
town"! How quickly he catches the first gesture of affectation and how
deftly he sets it forth, entertained and entertaining! From the
chuckling exordium of _The Magnificent Ambersons_ it is but a step to
_The Age of Innocence_ and _Main Street_. Little reflective as he has
allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in
writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, "thickness."
He has movement, he has energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he
has the leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to. And, unlike
those dozens of living American writers who once each wrote one good
book and then lapsed into dull oblivion or duller repetition, he has
traveled a long way from the methods of his greener days.

Why then does he continue to trifle with his thread-bare adolescents, as
if he were afraid to write candidly about his coevals? Why does he drift
with the sentimental tide and make propaganda for provincial
complacency? He must know better. He can do better.

_February 1921._

POSTSCRIPT.--He has done better. Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber
critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of
the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in _Alice Adams_ held
himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant
book. Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears
to be. Desire, in any of the deeper senses, she shows no signs of
feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and
actually his assured position and his assured prosperity. So considered,
her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch
more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies
of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than
human customs happen to approve. But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one
touch more of exaggeration. He understands that Alice's instinct to win
a husband is an ins