h about the frontier
farmers and their wives in language which might do something to lift the
desperate burdens of their condition. Consequently his passions and his
doctrines joined hands to fix the direction of his art; he both hated
the frontier and hinted at definite remedies which he thought would make
it more endurable.

It throws a strong light upon the progress of American society and
literature during the past generation to point out that the service
recently performed by _Main Street_ was, in its fashion, performed
thirty years ago by _Main-Travelled Roads_. Each book challenges the
myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair
Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers
are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the
farmers were oppressed. His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and
drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment
snatch away all that labor and parsimony have stored up. His women,
endowed with no matter what initial hopes or charms, are sacrificed to
overwork and deprivations and drag out maturity and old age on the
weariest treadmill. The pressure of life is simply too heavy to be borne
except by the ruthless or the crafty. Mr. Garland, though nourished on
the popular legend of the frontier, had come to feel that the "song of
emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives." Illusion no less
than reality had tempted Americans toward their far frontiers, and the
enormous mass, once under way, had rolled stubbornly westward, crushing
all its members who might desire to hesitate or to reflect.

The romancers had studied the progress of the frontier in the lives of
its victors; Mr. Garland studied it in the lives of its victims: the
private soldier returning drably and mutely from the war to resume his
drab, mute career behind the plow; the tenant caught in a trap by his
landlord and the law and obliged to pay for the added value which his
own toil has given to his farm; the brother neglected until his courage
has died and proffered assistance comes too late to rouse him; and
particularly the daughter whom a harsh father or the wife whom a brutal
husband breaks or drives away--the most sensitive and therefore the most
pitiful victims of them all. Mr. Garland told his early stories in the
strong, level, ominous language of a man who had observed much but chose
to write little. Not his words