important for our study of Mr. Lewis's development as exhibiting the intellectual stuffiness of the stagnating midwestern town, which was the point of departure for his own "revolt." It is still more important as disclosing plainly some of the things which his taste and intelligence recognize as beautiful and desirable. Mr. Lewis is a good hater, but, contrary to the common rumor, he is not all compact of antipathies. He has, I am convinced, a generalized conception of the Good, which, if he were a lyric poet, he could capture in a net of images, like Shelley addressing the Skylark. He likes free air, the swoop of the hawk, arrows that go straight to the mark. Everything that is candid, crisp, fresh, alert, clean, supple, active and darting, he likes. He has felt the allurement of "beauty with a touch of strangeness"; but he instinctively revolts when beauty is touched with morbidity. From Kipling, perhaps, he acquired an inclination for purposeful young men who keep themselves fit and are capable of bridging the Ganges, and for young women to match, with temperament controlled by intelligence—of the Beatrice type. Of Istra Nash, who reappears in The Trail of the Hawk, he remarks significantly: "She always wants new sensations, yet doesn't want to work, and the combination isn't very good." Carl Ericson, the flyer, relishes his adventures, and Mr. Lewis reports them with such sense of flight and clouds and the upper air as I have felt nowhere else save in Mr. Norman Hall's
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