I shall not add any comments to this beautifully colored piece, recalling, at once, both Gauguin, Matisse and Baudelaire, with the addition of a jazz band. The man who wrote this is certainly one of the greatest artists in words of American literature, if not the greatest and the most modern. If young America succeeds in creating an art of the New World, as original as that of the old one, she will owe it to Sherwood Anderson, as to her truest literary pathfinder. He may not be himself completely emancipated yet from his native loam. He looks very much like a faun fighting to disentangle himself from his dual nature, but as a colorist and a musician it is difficult to dispute him the first rank. Consumptive American fiction owes to him at least real flesh and blood. That he is a sensuous mystic can be concluded from his very definition of art. He calls art “a perfume issuing from the truth of things through the fingers of an humble man filled with love.” Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé, the founders of modern æsthetics, would certainly have endorsed this programme which gratifies harmoniously both the body and the soul. CHAPTER IX _James Branch Cabell and the Escape to Poictesme_ Amidst the triumph of realism, James Branch Cabell’s romantic works seem at first almost phenomenal in contemporary American fiction. They are interesting as an attempt to restore the imaginative element to the American novel. Although the romantic novel has never been extinct in America, there had been a very thin line drawn between realism and fiction. The growth of the realistic novel had been a natural reaction against sentimentalism.[50] As the puritanical tyranny became more strict and more imperious, the distinction between the _genres_ was lost. Puritanism forbade the painting of life as it is. Why should it be any more indulgent to fiction? Based on a system of repression, it would seem _a priori_ destined to accord well with romanticism, which is of itself based on statements contrary to fact and opposed to an exact and scientific presentation of life--a presentation full of threats for the victims of scruples, of floating anxiety and soul-fear. As I have shown, it is mainly in W. D. Howells’ work that this confusion between realism and fiction occurred. Howells, and the popular novelists after him, so thoroughly confused the issues that it became impossible to distinguish between the two. The American novelists, unencumbered with imaginative powers, and moralists above all, tried to succeed in the impossible task of giving to reality the semblance of fiction. The result of their efforts is a bastard _genre_, still triumphant to-day in countless magazines and in the “movies.” Fictitious realism would be an appropriate definition for the greater number of writers who pander to public taste in America.