affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the
middle teens. The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom
Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the
informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of "Silly Bill"
Baxter--at first diverting, it is also true--are exorbitantly multiplied
till reality drops out of the semblance. Calf-love does not always
remain a joke merely because there are mature spectators to stand by
nudging one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes its
least experienced victims. Those knowing asides which accompany these
juvenile records have been mistaken too often for shrewd, even for
profound, analyses of human nature. Actually they are only knowing, as
sophomores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few years. In
contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington is the perennial sophomore.

If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and Princeton, so also
may he be said never to have outgrown Indiana. In any larger sense, of
course, he has not needed to. A novelist does not require a universe in
which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently
perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord;
Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself
moving. But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious
attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism
of this or that of her sons, he himself nevertheless expands under a
similar stimulus. The impulse of Harkless to clasp all Carlow County to
his broad breast obviously sprang from a mood which Mr. Tarkington
himself had felt. And that impulse of that first novel has been
repeated again and again in the later characters. _In the Arena_, fruit
of Mr. Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature, is a study in
complacency. Setting out to take the world of politics as he finds it,
he comes perilously near to ending on the note of approval for it as it