shows, rather, that he is still fumbling in the confusion of current
life to get hold of something true and simple and to make it clear.

Perhaps he tried in _Poor White_ to manipulate a larger bulk than he is
yet ready for. Perhaps because he was aware of that he has worked in his
latest book, _The Triumph of the Egg_, with a variety of brief themes
and has excelled even _Winesburg_ in both poetry and truth. At least it
is certain that he keeps on advancing in his art. Although life has not
hardened for him, and he sees it still flowing or whirling, he steadily
sharpens his outlines and perfects the fierce intensity of his style.
Will his wisdom ever catch up with his passion and his observation? In
each successive book he has revealed himself as still hot with the fever
of his day's experiences. He has yet to show that he can go through the
confusion of new spiritual adventures and then set them down,
remembering, in tranquillity.


_E.W. Howe_

With _The Anthology of Another Town_ E.W. Howe, obviously on the
suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American
village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in _The Story of a
Country Town_ almost forty years before. Then he had been young enough
to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale,
somewhat as Emily Brontë under somewhat similar circumstances has done
for _Wuthering Heights_--the novel which Mr. Howe's story most
resembles. But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful
dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life
which sweetened the decade of the eighties. Even among the pioneers whom
Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness