Life, after all, is not as rosy as he thought. His good humor has disappeared. He is irritated at having wasted a fine evening. He is no longer so content with his affairs, as he goes to bed with the din of the city still in his ears. He sees the head of a red man bending toward him in his sleep.... This is the way Sherwood Anderson tells his apologues and dramatizes what he calls the failure of American life. At the end of the novel Beaut McGregor has become a famous and militant lawyer. His mother, Nance, is dead and he himself has buried her upon the hill. The description of Nance’s funeral is truly epic and resembles the strike in Zola’s “Germinal.” “Marching Men” ends on a sharp turn. Beaut McGregor courted two women, one poor and the other rich. He marries a shy, self-effacing milliner, to commemorate, perhaps, in his own fashion, the wedding of the Saint of Assisi with the Lady Poverty. * * * * * Anderson will not write such books again. The psychoanalyst will soon win over the mystic, but we know him pretty well now, from these first books, as a sensual and a mystic lover of Truth, as the detective of our hidden thoughts and of double hearts, as a man enamoured chiefly with dreams. There are several scenes in “Marching Men” characteristic of Sherwood Anderson at his best as an artist. He belongs among the novelists of the proletariat, nearer Dostoievski and Tolstoi than Victor Hugo or Émile Zola, because of his mysticism. I select the narrative of the death of Beaut McGregor’s mother, Nance, as an example of his talent to blend the here below with the far beyond. Nance dies of utter misery on a fine evening. She kept a little bakery. Since the death of her husband in the mine, she lived in complete seclusion, respected and feared by the miners: In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she would die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for her. In the street two drunken men stood talking, their voices concerned with their own human affairs coming in through the window and making life seem very near and dear to the dying woman. “I’ve been everywhere,” said one of the men. “I’ve been in towns and cities I don’t even remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who keeps a saloon in Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there.” The other man laughed. “You’ve been in Jake’s drinking too much beer,” he jeered.