world, written by a man apparently incapable of conceiving anything else.
Now Mr. Lewis, with increasing clearness of apprehension and vitality of presentation, has devoted himself to the portrayal of the representative. There is no denying the vigor or the representativeness of the types presented in The Job, Main Street and Babbitt. Nor is there doubt in anyone's mind that Mr. Lewis's contemporary scene is drenched in irony and raked with satire. The one rather serious objection which one hears raised against his work is that the standards, the existence of which are implied in any consistently satiric picture of society,—the standards by which Mr. Lewis judges, for instance, Gopher Prairie and Zenith—are not sufficiently in evidence. The publication of Babbitt is likely to increase the frequency of that objection; for while in Main Street there are at least four persons, including Carol, with quite definite conceptions of what ought to be done to increase beauty and interest in Gopher Prairie, in Babbitt these quite definite improvements have been made, without essential increase of beauty or interest in the lives of the citizens; and no one in the book seems to understand what to do next. We are on the brink of a Tolstoyan problem. The artistic charm and vivacity of this novel, to say nothing of its social stimulation, would have been heightened by somewhat freer employment of those devices of dramatic contrast of which Mr. Lewis is a master—by the introduction of some character or group capable of
