Breaking loose is the thing to do: breaking loose, resenting the bonds, opening new ways: but when a fellow breaks loose or starts to or even only thinks he thinks he'll revolt, he should be quite sure he knows what he has undertaken. I expected hell: I got it: nothing that has occurred to me was a surprise. Turning back a hundred pages I found this: I have always had an idea that I should some day move off--be alone: finish my life in isolation. This is the thought of the natural man who would die like a man. One could quote indefinitely from this extraordinary autobiography of the most outstanding figure in American literature. DEWITT C. WING. Midstream _Midstream_, by Will Levington Comfort. [George H. Doran Company, New York.] A direct, big thing--so simple that almost no one has done it before--this Mr. Comfort has dared. He gives us the story of his own life to the mid-way mark. It is not an autobiography--one of those deferential veilings of truth, a blinding of the spectator by the scattering of fact-dust. After reading it one does not remember clearly the author's various removals from Detroit to other centers of activity; one remembers the vital events in his consciousness, the shames, triumphs, and searchings of his body and soul. Here is a man's life laid absolutely bare. There is no use in explaining the value of such a book to those who do not admit it. People to whom reserve is more important than truth; people who are made uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything--these will not read _Midstream_ through. The others will see here a chance to understand. And they will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility of Mr. Comfort's frankness. If a thousand writers should give us such books we should understand better the much-befogged basis of all human problems--"human nature." Every man draws his own conclusions about vital matters from just such introspection as this, whether it be conscious or unconscious. But every man does not have the candor and the hard-won insight of the trained writer. It would be possible to enter into futile discussions about the "artistic" value of such a book--whether naturalism can give us as fine a work as imagination. Whatever might be the result of such a discussion, Mr. Comfort's book remains interesting, and interest is the first value of any written work. He is neither a Wilde nor a Turgenev, but he is a true writer. To recapitulate the adventures of the sensitive and often unwholesome boy, the degradations and victories of the young newspaper reporter, the soldier, the war correspondent, the husband, and the writer, would be to undermine the novel itself. If you want to experience them, let Mr. Comfort be the narrator.