him on the lonely prairie; he cherished a patriotism for his province
which went a long way toward restoring him to it in time. Sentimental
and romantic considerations, however, did not influence him altogether
in his first important work. He had been kindled by Howells in Boston to
a passion for realism which carried him beyond the suave accuracy of his
master to the somber veracity of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie
Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_. This veracity was more than
somber; it was deliberate and polemic. Mr. Garland, ardently a radical
of the school of Henry George, had enlisted in the crusade against
poverty, and he desired to tell the unheeded truth about the frontier
farmers and their wives in language which might do something to lift the
desperate burdens of their condition. Consequently his passions and his
doctrines joined hands to fix the direction of his art; he both hated
the frontier and hinted at definite remedies which he thought would make
it more endurable.

It throws a strong light upon the progress of American society and
literature during the past generation to point out that the service
recently performed by _Main Street_ was, in its fashion, performed
thirty years ago by _Main-Travelled Roads_. Each book challenges the
myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair
Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers
are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the
farmers were oppressed. His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and
drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment
snatch away all that labor and parsimony have stored up. His women,
endowed with no matter what initial hopes or charms, are sacrificed to
overwork and deprivations and drag out maturity and old age on the
weariest treadmill. The pressure of life is simply too heavy to be borne
except by the ruthless or the crafty. Mr. Garland, though nourished on