THE AMERICAN NOVEL

what she saw. The book is a comic pageant, a panoramic
caricature of a small provincial town. Almost every American
town had a Main Street as a matter of course, Lewis made the
name a symbol and an epithet. Main Street became a synonym
for narrow provincialism. People spoke of Main Street minds
or customs without needing to explain further what they
meant He could have fixed the epithet so deeply in the na-
tional consciousness only by giving it the sharp point of un-
mistakable ideas. But he reinforced his ideas by innumerable
instances. The novel is full of persons, and they are shown
in a continuous variety of incidents to illustrate Gopher
Prairie's virtues and vices. The vices seemed in 3.920 to out-
weigh the virtues overwhelmingly, because they were shown
in a proportion new to American country novels. In time the
vices and virtues came to seem more justly balanced. Much
praise was at first given to the brilliant accuracy of the dia-
logue. In time it became clear that the dialogue was partly
creation: the American vernacular enlivened by Lewis's own
characteristic idiom and cadences.

A complete example of this enlivened vernacular appeared
in his next novel, Babbitt (1922), in the speech the hero
makes before the Zenith Chamber of Commerce. No actual
enthusiast ever spoke with such swift and full and revealing
glibness. What Babbitt says is quintessential and archetypal
Thousands of such speeches had been undertaken by such
men. Here was the speech they would all have liked to make*
Babbitt at once became as much a symbol and an epithet as
Main Street, and the name Babbitt a synonym for a conven-
tional business man. From the village Lewis had turned to
another American tradition. The business man in fiction had
been often a hero, sometimes a malefactor. Lewis studied
him more fundamentally, in a case that was taken to be a
specimen. George F. Babbitt has not prospered according to
the familiar maxims about economy, industry, and persever-
ance. He has more or less blundered into such success as he