And quite truly, from the spiritual and moral point of view, the live are dead in Winesburg. No matter if they do go about their daily tasks, if they play at being born, at marrying, at having children, at making money, at voting, at going to church, at talking of the weather or the approaching elections. This is not life. Spiritually and morally, the Winesburghers are as dead as the corpses whose epitaphs Edgar Lee Masters collected in the “Spoon River Anthology.” At most, Sherwood Anderson accords to the inhabitants of Winesburg a larval existence, a life of sleepwalkers and daydreamers. Of the various selves which William James classified in his treatise on psychology, and which he called the _material_, the _social_ and the _spiritual_ selves, the living dead of Winesburg possess only the most elementary, _i.e._, the material. Their social and their spiritual selves are illusory. Instead of actions they know only manias; instead of ambitions, velleities; instead of achievements, dreams. Let the professional psychiatrist read these tales. He will find in them all the forms of psychic degeneracy. The embryonic and larval life of Winesburg defies even the slow-motion process of photographic reproduction. Still life and twilight sleep prevail here as the characteristic phases of existence. How strange a paradox that the land of the _strenuous life_ should shelter such moral mummies.[45] In “Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson closed without hope the gates of the mystic evasion through which the characters of his early novels used to escape. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!” Dante’s Inferno is an Eden compared to this American abode of unescapable gloom. * * * * *