Carol stands as a living protest against the morons who surround her thick as bats in a cellar. And yet when the end comes, she capitulates and reënters Philistia willingly. It is difficult to know what to make out of her. Flaubert, at least, was consistent in “Madame Bovary.” Emma preferred death to capitulation. Suicide was for her the only dignified solution of her problems. Imagine a Bovary converted to the standards of her village with Doctor Rouault for her lord, and M. Homais or Abbé Bournisien for her company until death! Sinclair Lewis’ attitude towards Carol is not clear. One dreams of her and of George Babbitt as faithful in their revolt; of a Carol who should never return to her commonplace country doctor or to the stagnant pools of Gopher Prairie; of a Babbitt who should enlist with the I.W.W. and not leave the responsibility for a happier future to his son. But this would be pessimism and bolshevism _à la_ Tolstoi or _à la_ Romain Rolland. This is an impossibility in America. So “Main Street” ends as quietly and edifyingly as, let us say, “The Awakening of Helena Ritchie.” Carol Kennicott, in any case, incarnates two characteristic American traits,--on one hand the craving for independence, on the other the almost morbid zeal for reform and apostolicism. She is a born missionary. When she denounces the pettiness and vulgarity of Gopher Prairie, it is doubtless Sinclair Lewis who speaks through her. But when she pretends to destroy the world and to rebuild it in three days, the novelist turns against her as against a Don Quixote in skirts. Idealism in America, especially feminine idealism, is too easily turned into intolerance and witch burning. * * * * *