against the kind of personalities which this society produces, and against the quantity and: quality of the human satisfactions which these personalities have at their disposal. It is directed against that defect in our civilization which Arnold pointed out; it is so lacking in elevation and beauty; it is so humdrum, so dreadfully uninteresting; it so fails to appease the vague yet already acutely painful hunger of the average man for a good life. 'Beguile us no longer,' cry the new voices; 'beguile us no longer with heroic legends and romantic idyls. The life which you celebrate is not beautiful, not healthy, not satisfying. It is ugly, obscene, devastating. It is driving us mad. And we are going to revolt from it.'
The manifestation of this spirit which, at the present moment, is attracting most attention is what Mr. Van Doren, in his interesting book on Contemporary American Novelists, has called 'the revolt from the village.' I need only remind you of that long series of narratives, beginning in the early eighties with E. W. Howe's Story of a Country Town, and followed by Hamlin Garland's Main Travelled Roads, Mr. Masters's Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett, and
