he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair." I quote this sentence from Mr. Lawrence's fantastic and curious Fantasia of the Unconscious. And from his Studies in Classic American Literature I quote these words, calculated to trouble both his enemies and his friends: "The essential function of art is moral. Not æsthetic, nor decorative, nor pastime and recreation, but moral. The essential function of art is moral." This will perhaps trouble Mr. Hergesheimer more than it troubles me.
Among the later novelists of the Middle West one might choose either Sherwood Anderson or Ben Hecht as a striking representative of the anti-Puritan movement. But there is so much cloudy symbolism in the author of Many Marriages that one may more expeditiously indicate the position of the author of Gargoyles—and of less widely circulated works. Mr. Hecht, generally speaking, appears to be the inheritor of Mr. Dreiser's moral outfit, during the latter's lifetime. He interests me more than Mr. Dreiser ever did, because his intellectual processes are much more rapid. Mr. Dreiser reaches his conclusion by a slow, ver-
