Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/202

 representation in fiction; with vision of arresting centrality and sharpness, Mr. Lewis is giving it. The publication of Babbitt set a thousand reviewers to discussing whether it equalled the novel, Main Street, which fluttered their dovecotes in 1920. It is my purpose rather to invite somewhat more serious attention to the quality of his work as a whole, and his significance on the contemporary scene.

When Mark Twain, Henry James, and W. D. Howells died, the wide domain of American realism gaped for a masculine heir. There followed an interval in which no one would read an American who could get a British novel. The field swarmed with claimants who could not be taken seriously, who were just "outside" literature. There was an occasional offering by an old hand, but the "movement" halted for lack of adequate leadership. Poetry was said to be "looking up"—to Mr. Masters and to Miss Lowell, who from different directions had given it fresh impetus. But in prose fiction there seemed to be, say, ten years ago, no one "significant" to swear by or to swear at but Mr. Dreiser, a "barbarian" who had never learned to write English. In their desperation, the critical instigators of our "movement" urged us for a time to look up to Mr. Dreiser. Later they shifted their attention to a more scrupulous artist, Mr. Hergesheimer, who was veering uncertainly between realism and an exotic type of the historical-romantic, and to Mr. Cabell, who had achieved a succès de scandale in the erotic-fantastic. From the "lunatic fringe" of experimentation there