Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/215

 has learned something about the care of his nails from his association with Claire Boltwood, and she something about shifting gears from him, the affair, like the Beggar's Opera, is carried off with too light an air to effect subversively the foundation of society.

Main Street, 1920, is another story. Mr. Lewis had been incubating it for six or seven years, though I suspect that his faculties were edged for its final revision by his comparative study of American small towns, made on that excursion over the Lincoln Highway, which he so gaily chronicled in Free Air. A second novel as deeply rooted in his native soil and in his own past would be as difficult a feat for him as, for their respective authors, a second Huckleberry Finn, a second David Copperfield, a second Mill on the Floss, a second Pendennis, a second Clayhanger. Like these other five great novels, Main Street appears to be the harvest of the writer's best land, which is so often his native heath and the deep impressions of early life, ineffaceable by the lapse of years, and poignantly touching the heart through the revisiting eyes of age. In its exhibition of the interwoven lives of the community, it has the authority, the intimacy, the many-sided insights, the deep saturation of color, which no journalist can ever "get up," which are possible only, one is tempted to say, to one who packs into his book the most vital experience and observation of a lifetime. One must have lived that stuff in order to have reproduced it as living organism. And it is with some vague sense that a man can contain only one great