[36] The “dance before the mirror,” as the French playwright François de Curel called it. [37] In fact very little respect of any sort. For the desecration in particular of the myth of birth, I refer the reader to the orgiastic chapters in “Tar,” contrasting the birth of the little pigs with that of a human being. The scene is almost epic in its coarse nakedness. [38] “A Story Teller’s Story.” [39] Anderson has told her story in “Tar.” [40] A lesson which Anderson, as some of his critics tell, probably learned from Gertrude Stein, a virtuoso of the suggestive language to an extreme which the disciple has not yet followed, fortunately for us. Miss Stein’s story of an American family is a quarry where many curious gravels can be found, but no statues. [41] Stephane Mallarmé, a pioneer of modern æsthetics, was himself a victim of a similar spell. At the end of his career he replaced inspiration by throwing haphazard words in black on white. He originated a new process of composition in which words produced their effect by sheer magic, like those Japanese paper-balls which blossom out into a display of flowers when placed in a glass of water. [42] Is not this proletarian appeal the main sign of difference between the old and the new order of things in American literature? Passing from William Dean Howells to Sherwood Anderson is like descending the social ladder several rungs. No more well-to-do bourgeois, Laphams or Kentons. Now Middle Western literature takes us down to the ground floor and sometimes to the basement of democracy. [43] In French _les refoulés_. [44] This celebrated moving picture from the German studios has lately put psychoanalysis on the screen and made it intelligible to the masses. “Winesburg, Ohio” is not the only book of its kind which gives a literary rendering to Freudism. It is contemporary of and well in keeping with Pirandello’s plays, Eugene O’Neill’s drama and the newest French plays by Lenormand, Sarment, Cromelynck, and others. [45] _L’énergie américaine, l’énergie anglo-saxonne_, such was for the last half a century the slogan of almost all the French travelers to the United States. Did not a French consul write, a few years before the War, a book called “La supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” based on the same views? These critics knew only the surface of city life in America. They ignored Winesburg and, of course, had not read Sherwood Anderson. Decadence or, as Max Nordau called it in a sensational book “Degeneracy,” has become a current topic in the books of the younger American writers. Most of them could be inscribed with George Cabot Lodge’s saying that: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third rate.” Such a statement certainly calls for a serious qualification but it may prove useful as a “damper” against the professional panegyrists abroad and the megalomaniacs at home.