As to Sinclair Lewis as an artist, I have already noted along the way many of his merits and his defects. He lacks consistency and balance in composition. His books seem to come not out of a deliberate and well-matured design, but of a blind and fervid vital impulse. “Arrowsmith,” like “Elmer Gantry,” is written haphazardly. They are not plastic, but show a rare gift of verbal effusion. There is a mimic in every word which Lewis writes. From this point of view his only rival is Dickens. By what name should we call this peculiar sense of his which enables him to catch, as by a spontaneous contagion, the words such as they are spoken, and to reproduce them with the accuracy of a vitaphone? The average American in his novels may look like an automaton when he thinks or acts, but, in speech, he is life itself. Lewis’ facility for verbal invention is prodigious. I have no authority to comment upon American linguistics. But I have already alluded to Mr. Mencken’s book “The American Language.” I hope that he will not forget George Babbitt and his friends as contributors to the next enlarged edition of his volume. Where could we look for a more spontaneous and fruitful eloquence? The American vernacular in “Babbitt” is as nimble, “snappy,” cheerful and nervous as the American himself. Has anybody ever more skilfully aped the living dynamism of the American language?[34] * * * * * “Elmer Gantry” marks a new progress toward satire and a deepening of Lewis’ social pessimism. It is still more bitter and more acrimonious than “Arrowsmith.” It was not written to please. The author has unmasked his batteries at last and thrown himself in open sedition against the church. The book is one of the mightiest strokes ever hit at hypocrisy since the days of “Tartuffe.” Hypocrisy takes a dangerous and frankly criminal aspect in “Elmer Gantry,” a Barnum of religion. America is not a country of hypocrites. Everybody there lives in the open. If hypocrisy exists it is not individual but collective. The old-fashioned hypocrite in European literature was interesting as an exception. He might be called a hypocrite by defect. Gantry, on the contrary, is a hypocrite by excess, and, one might say, by hyperbole. He is always beyond truth, not under it. He is a hypocrite by ambitions and anticipation, like Mark Twain’s Colonel Sellers. And yet Gantry is even more repugnant than Tartuffe. He is a scoundrel, a debauché and a cheat. Sinclair Lewis has drawn his portrait at length from the day when he entered the ministry as one joins a baseball team, until his triumph as an evangelist in his big church at Zenith. The scene in the beginning of the book, where he abandons the woman whom he has compromised and passes her to a rival with a lie, is enough to brand him. Let the reader remember also the raid in the red-light districts, where Gantry acts as a bully. But the triumph of his venom will be