was an ominous buzzing of "Freudians." Whatever was most unwholesome in the fiction of Russia, France, Germany, and the younger England was cried up by our criticasters and seized upon for imitation. As a fairly direct consequence of the critical encouragement given to bad English and mad psychology, we are now asked to admire such erotic rubbish as Mr. Waldo Frank's Rahab, in which a female finds amid the "sickly dissolutions" of the underworld, as Mr. Lewis Mumford tenderly phrases it, "like a rainbow glimmering over a pool of stagnant water, a justification and a light." As I trust even Mr. Mencken would say,—"Bosh!" But in the fall of 1920 arrived, to deliver the beleaguered citadel of our hope and sanity, Mr. Sinclair Lewis with Main Street.
Now Main Street, a criticism of contemporary life with special reference to its interest and beauty, is important to us socially because, more thoroughly than any novel since Uncle Tom's Cabin, it has shaken our complacency with regard to the average quality of our civilization. But it and the other work of Mr. Lewis which I shall discuss, are equally important to our literature as a return to the main matter and the manner of our national narrative.
If we had applied ourselves more diligently to the search for a deliverer, we might have observed that Mr. Lewis was coming, far back in 1914, when he published Our Mr. Wrenn—as the seductive title suggests, a merrily bubbling story with a "happy ending," somewhat in the vein of H. G. Wells's
