Sherwood. Anderson's Tales of the New Life injured no one's sensibilities. It is in the grand style, I suppose. But Sherwood Anderson knows that stable boys, farmhands, and washerwomen, so far as they attempt to phrase a kindred urge, do not phrase it in that way. Their speech in this field is poor and meager. It is of the very essence of their misery that they cannot give it a name. They can only say, per haps: "Oh, I feel so queer—so queer!" or "Hell, but I'd like a drink!" or "I want a woman." And if they act upon these urges they are likely to act in a way which only a man who understands very primitive signs and symbols could interpret as a cry for "glory, more glory, on the earth."
And yet I am sorry for any one who doesn't get the "glory" in a bit of the vernacular, like this:
Often he would go on talking for an hour maybe, speaking of horses' bodies and of their minds and wi as though they were human beings. "Lord help us, Herman," he would say, grabbing hold of my arm, "don't it get you up in the throat? I say, now, when a good one like that Lumpy Joe I'm swiping, flattens himself at the head of the stretch and he's coming, and you know he's coming, and you know his heart's sound, and he's game, and you know he isn't going to let himself get licked—don't it get you, Herman; don't it get you like the old Harry?"
It does me!
Well, there is what I have found of chief interest in Sherwood Anderson, and the only way to determine whether all these qualities are really in him or whether I have imagined them, is to read his books.
