Anderson has dedicated himself once more to the task of raising the lid of the “well.” In “Dark Laughter” it is again the story of a spiritual evasion and the return to erotic sincerity. Psychological insight and verbal lyricism are beautifully and musically blended in this book. In it the author is felt to become more and more conscious and to have acquired a greater mastery of his instruments of expression. Lyrical outbursts, soliloquies and descriptions are brought into perfect harmony. The hero of “Dark Laughter,” Bruce Dudley, alias John Stockton, is another John Webster. He began his career as a reporter, got a good position, married and ... ran away. He dropped his wife and his job to become a tramp. He began anew earning a living by painting carriage wheels in company with a comrade similar to those celebrated by Walt Whitman. He then becomes a gardener and falls in love at first sight with his employer’s wife. It is the inspiration, the miracle so much looked for by John Webster. So Bruce and Aline wed sincerity and elope.... But it would be a betrayal of Anderson to reduce the plots of his books, especially this one, to such trivial incidents. For him the orchestration is more important than the theme. The main charm of “Dark Laughter” is its poetry and its music, the curious and clever blending of thought, dream, color and song. It is a sort of _sotto voce_ monologue with musical interludes. In several of Anderson’s books there had already been an undertone of music echoing the thoughts of the characters. He has perfected the process in “Dark Laughter.” The scene of the novel is laid upon the shores of the Ohio and of the Mississippi. These gigantic American waterways, sung to the tune of a Greek hymn by Monsieur de Chateaubriand and desecrated in modern times by Mark Twain, become musical again through Sherwood Anderson’s poetic prose. There is an orchestra of Negro minstrels on the shore and on the deck of the boat which takes Bruce Dudley to New Orleans. The writer looks to Negro music as to the symbol of free instinctive expression. The humming of Negro spirituals accompanies the soliloquies of Bruce Dudley like the tom-tom in “Emperor Jones.” The black man’s songs in Anderson’s novels emphasize the return to nature. They are the last avatars of romanticism in America, the protest of nature against civilization, a challenge to social hypocrisy.[49] While the white man broods at home over his woes, real or imaginary, the black sings naturally in the open and vents his naïve soul in hymns and laughter, with an occasional strain of melancholy, soothing itself as it is sung. Anderson finds in these Negro chanteys what he calls “a way of getting at the ultimate truth of things,” which is tantamount, almost, to a system of metaphysics. The pages devoted to New Orleans in “Dark Laughter” are among the most original ever written by the author. Here is the homecoming of Bruce Dudley in the old creole city: