It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves Christians but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed, is to take life and courage away. For so long we have to push blindly forward. Roads had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we must build now, in a lifetime. In our father’s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls the wolves still howl. Sam McPherson represents the two states of the American conscience, the Christian and the primitive. Half of his life was spent like that of Theodore Dreiser’s realistic heroes. He succeeded practically; that is, he failed morally and spiritually. Finally the angel in him got the best of the beast. He found salvation in humility and renouncement, like another Saint Francis. The mystic longings of Sherwood Anderson have left an unmistakable imprint on this early work. He was not content to draw his characters in unconsciousness. He counselled them, comforted them, and acted to them as a good Samaritan. * * * * * “Marching Men,” an epic in three parts, is also a fine book, although sociology and mysticism are blended in it to the point of confusion. It reads very much like Zola’s “Germinal.” The hero of the book, Beaut McGregor, is the son of a Pennsylvania miner, who was buried alive in a mine. The book is full of these soberly drawn and semi-allegorical portraits in which the author excels: the oculist, the hunchback, the violin maker, the philosophical barber, the poor milliner. Robert Frost alone can be a match to Anderson in this kind of telepathic sketches. Beaut McGregor is searching for the imponderable values of life, yet he finds drunkenness, sex and hunger as the sole incentives of most men’s existence.