The same qualities may be noted in _Domesday Book_. Its scheme and machinery are promising: a philosophical coroner, holding his inquest over the body of a girl found mysteriously dead, undertakes to trace the mystery not only to its immediate cause but up to its primary source and out to its remotest consequences. At times the tale means to be an allegory of America during the troubled, roiled, destroying years of the war; at times it means to be a "census spiritual" of American society. Elenor Murray, in her birth and love and sufferings and desperate end, is represented as pure nature, "essential genius," acting out its fated processes in a world of futile or corrupting inhibitions. But Mr. Masters has less skill at portraying the sheer genius of an individual than at arraigning the inhibitions of the individual's society. When he steps down from his watch-tower of irony he can hate as no other American poet does. His hates, however, do not always pass into poetry; they too frequently remain hard, sullen masses of animosity not fused with his narrative but standing out from it and adding an unmistakable personal rhythm to the rough beat of his verse. So, too, do his heaps of turgid learning and his scientific speculations often remain undigested. A good many of his characters are cut to fit the narrative plan, not chosen from reality to make up the narrative. The total effect is often crude and heavy; and yet beneath these uncompleted surfaces are the sinews of enormous power: a greedy gusto for life, a wide imaginative experience, tumultuous uprushes; of emotion and expression, an acute if undisciplined intelligence, great masses of the veritable stuff of existence out of which great novels are made. _Sherwood Anderson_