lighter irony is not one of his principal endowments. Restrained and
direct as he always is so far as language goes, he cannot always keep
his action absolutely in hand: this or that person or incident now and
then breaks out of the pattern; the skeleton of a formula now and then
becomes too prominent.

It is his intelligence which makes his satire sharp and significant; it
is his conscience which lends passion to his representation and lifts
him often to a true if sober eloquence. But in at least two of his
novels imagination takes him, as only imagination can take a novelist,
beyond the reach of either intelligence or conscience. _Together_, a
little cumbersome, a little sprawling, nevertheless glows with an
intensity which gives off heat as well as light. It is more than an
exhaustive document upon modern marriage; it is interpretation as well.
_Clark's Field_, a sparer, clearer story, is even more than
interpretation; it is a work of art springing from a spirit which has
taken fire and has transmuted almost all its abstract conceptions into
genuine flesh and blood. That _Clark's Field_ is Mr. Herrick's latest
novel heightens the expectation with which one hears that after a
silence of seven years he now plans to return to fiction.


4. UPTON SINCLAIR

The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair
has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art. In his youth he
was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to
detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly
confident. His first character--the hero of _Springtime and Harvest_
and of _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_--belonged to the lamenting race