From a literary point of view, “Elmer Gantry” shows the author in the process of broadening his scope, while he intensifies the virulence of his attacks. After the village idealist, the inhibited realtor; the doctors, and then the clergymen. Who next? And yet through all these avatars Sinclair Lewis has drawn always the same man. Good or bad, he is the same. Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry were born the same day, of the same parent. They all share in what seems to be, on the part of the novelist, an excess of vitality. The large majority of the characters in the American novels had been up to then anæmic. Sinclair Lewis’ characters suffer from high blood pressure. It would be a great loss to American literature if he should forget art for muck-raking. Let him remember the lesson of Balzac and Flaubert. Those great realists never lost sight of human passions, but they contrived to hold art for its own sake far above the surge of their emotions. They believed that, after all, our foibles, our defects or vices were much less interesting and important than the view which the artist can take of them in cold blood. CHAPTER VII _Sherwood Anderson or When the Dreamer Awakes_ Few American authors, since Whitman, have taken literature as seriously or have conceived it as being on so high a level of mysticism as Sherwood Anderson. I mention Whitman advisedly in connection with Anderson. His influence over the younger American writers is manifest. Was he not the first to emphasize the bio-chemical element, and to find lyrical inspiration in it? Dreiser’s hymns to the Vital Force, his pæans to physiology, as well as his tragic sense of everyday life bear Whitman’s imprint unmistakably. Sherwood Anderson owes him still more. Sensualism and mysticism blend in his prose as they do in Whitman’s poems. In the words of both of them we hear simultaneously the whispers of heavenly death and the somber droning of the _Erdgeist_. Both of them have given heed to what Emerson called the _demonic_. Both have brought the soul and the body into magic and sensuous contact. The poetry of the one and the poetic prose of the other seem to come from an embrace in which the spiritual and the material still coalesce. Modern as they are in many respects, the stamp of primitivism is on them. In Anderson’s novels, man, like the cosmos in “Leaves of Grass,” has not yet been disengaged from that amorphous clay kneaded by the gods. He still finds himself in a nebulous state, halfway between himself and animal.[35] “Mid-American Chants” are authentic grafts budding from “Leaves of Grass.” To call Sherwood Anderson an _ex professo_ writer or an _homme de lettres_ would be amiss. Fiction and song are only an outlet for his spiritual longings. Writing is for him a groping toward the Unknown, a mystic ejaculation of a mind in quest of itself. His works give us a chance to catch the creative spirit in process of formation.