Chapter 2

ARGUMENT

1. HAMLIN GARLAND

The pedigree of the most energetic and important fiction now being written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent, arrogant grand march.

The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative order brought out of competitive chaos; had William Dean Howells for its annalist of manners, turning toward the end of the decade from his benevolent acceptance of the world as it was to stout-hearted, though soft-voiced, accusations brought in the name of Tolstoy and the Apostles against human inequality however constituted; had--to end the list of instances without going outside the literary class--Hamlin Garland for its principal spokesman of the distress and dissatisfaction then stirring along the changed frontier which so long as free land lasted had been the natural outlet for the expansive, restless race.

Heretofore the prairies and the plains had depended almost wholly upon romance--and that often of the cheapest sort--for their literary reputation; Mr. Garland, who had tested at first hand the innumerable hardships of such a life, became articulate through his dissent from average notions about the pioneer. His earliest motives of dissent seem to have been personal and artistic. During that youth which saw him borne steadily westward, from his Wisconsin birthplace to windy Iowa and then to bleak Dakota, his own instincts clashed with those of his migratory father as the instincts of many a sensitive, unremembered youth must have clashed with the dumb, fierce urges of the leaders of migration everywhere. The younger Garland hungered on the frontier for beauty and learning and leisure; the impulse which eventually detached him from Dakota and sent him on a trepid, reverent pilgrimage to Boston was the very impulse which, on another scale, had lately detached Henry James from his native country and had sent him to the ancient home of his forefathers in the British Isles.

Mr. Garland could neither feel so free nor fly so far from home as James. He had, in the midst of his raptures and his successes in New England, still to remember the plight of the family he had left behind him on the lonely prairie; he cherished a patriotism for his province which went a long way toward restoring him to it in time. Sentimental and romantic considerations, however, did not influence him altogether in his first important work. He had been kindled by Howells in Boston to a passion for realism which carried him beyond the suave accuracy of his master to the somber veracity of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_. This veracity was more than somber; it was deliberate and polemic. Mr. Garland, ardently a radical of the school of Henry George, had enlisted in the crusade against poverty, and he desired to tell the unheeded truth about the frontier farmers and their wives in language which might do something to lift the desperate burdens of their condition. Consequently his passions and his doctrines joined hands to fix the direction of his art; he both hated the frontier and hinted at definite remedies which he thought would make it more endurable.

It throws a strong light upon the progress of American society and literature during the past generation to point out that the service recently performed by _Main Street_ was, in its fashion, performed thirty years ago by _Main-Travelled Roads_. Each book challenges the myth of the rural beauties and the rural virtues; but whereas Sinclair Lewis, in an intellectual and satiric age, charges that the villagers are dull, Mr. Garland, in a moral and pathetic age, charged that the farmers were oppressed. His men wrestle fearfully with sod and mud and drought and blizzard, goaded by mortgages which may at almost any moment snatch away all that labor and parsimony have stored up. His women, endowed with no matter what initial hopes or charms, are sacrificed to overwork and deprivations and drag out maturity and old age on the weariest treadmill. The pressure of life is simply too heavy to be borne except by the ruthless or the crafty. Mr. Garland, though nourished on the popular legend of the frontier, had come to feel that the "song of emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives." Illusion no less than reality had tempted Americans toward their far frontiers, and the enormous mass, once under way, had rolled stubbornly westward, crushing all its members who might desire to hesitate or to reflect.

The romancers had studied the progress of the frontier in the lives of its victors; Mr. Garland studied it in the lives of its victims: the private soldier returning drably and mutely from the war to resume his drab, mute career behind the plow; the tenant caught in a trap by his landlord and the law and obliged to pay for the added value which his own toil has given to his farm; the brother neglected until his courage has died and proffered assistance comes too late to rouse him; and particularly the daughter whom a harsh father or the wife whom a brutal husband breaks or drives away--the most sensitive and therefore the most pitiful victims of them all. Mr. Garland told his early stories in the strong, level, ominous language of a man who had observed much but chose to write little. Not his words but the overtones vibrating through them cry out that the earth and the fruits of the earth belong to all men and yet a few of them have turned tiger or dog or jackal and snatched what is precious for themselves while their fellows starve and freeze. Insoluble as are the dilemmas he propounded and tense and unrelieved as his accusations were, he stood in his methods nearer, say, to the humane Millet than to the angry Zola. There is a clear, high splendor about his landscapes; youth and love on his desolate plains, as well as anywhere, can find glory in the most difficult existence; he might strip particular lives relentlessly bare but he no less relentlessly clung to the conviction that human life has an inalienable dignity which is deeper than any glamor goes and can survive the loss of all its trappings.

Why did Mr. Garland not equal the intellectual and artistic success of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ for a quarter of a century? At the outset he had passion, knowledge, industry, doctrine, approbation, and he labored hard at enlarging the sagas of which these books were the center. Yet _Jason Edwards_, _A Spoil of Office_, _A Member of the Third House_ are dim names and the Far Western tales which succeeded them grow too rapidly less impressive as they grow older. The rise of historical romance among the American followers of Stevenson at the end of the century and the subsequent rise of flippancy under the leadership of O. Henry have both been blamed for the partial eclipse into which Mr. Garland's reputation passed. As a matter of fact, the causes were more fundamental than the mere fickleness of literary reputation or than the demands of editors and public that he repeat himself forever. In that first brilliant cycle of stories this downright pioneer worked with the material which of all materials he knew best and over which his imagination played most eagerly. From them, however, he turned to pleas for the single tax and to exposures of legislative corruption and imbecility about which he neither knew nor cared so much as he knew and cared about the actual lives of working farmers. His imagination, whatever his zeal might do in these different surroundings, would not come to the old point of incandescence.

Instead, however, of diagnosing his case correctly Mr. Garland followed the false light of local color to the Rocky Mountains and began the series of romantic narratives which further interrupted his true growth and, gradually, his true fame. He who had grimly refused to lend his voice to the chorus chanting the popular legend of the frontier in which he had grown up and who had studied the deceptive picture not as a visitor but as a native, now became himself a visiting enthusiast for the "high trails" and let himself be roused by a fervor sufficiently like that from which he had earlier dissented. In his different way he was as hungry for new lands as his father had been before him. Looking upon local color as the end--when it is more accurately the beginning--of fiction, he felt that he had exhausted his old community and must move on to fresher pastures.

Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him: he believed that if he had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him he might have found in that microcosm as many passions and tragedies and joys as he or any novelist could have needed for a lifetime. Here, too, the prime penalty of his school overtook him: he came to lay so much emphasis upon outward manners that he let his plots and characters fall into routine and formula. The novels of his middle period--such as _Her Mountain Lover_, _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, _Hester_, _The Light of the Star_, _Cavanagh, Forest Ranger_--too frequently recur to the romantic theme of a love uniting some powerful, uneducated frontiersman and some girl from a politer neighborhood. Pioneer and lady are always almost the same pair in varying costumes; the stories harp upon the praise of plains and mountains and the scorn of cities and civilization. These romances, much value as they have as documents and will long continue to have, must be said to exhibit the frontier as self-conscious, obstreperous, given to insisting upon its difference from the rest of the world. In ordinary human intercourse such insistence eventually becomes tiresome; in literature no less than in life there is a time to remember local traits and a time to forget them in concerns more universal.

What concerns of Mr. Garland's were universal became evident when he published _A Son of the Middle Border_. His enthusiasms might be romantic but his imagination was not; it was indissolubly married to his memory of actual events. The formulas of his mountain romances, having been the inventions of a mind not essentially inventive, had been at best no more than sectional; the realities of his autobiography, taking him back again to _Main-Travelled Roads_ and its cycle, were personal, lyrical, and consequently universal. All along, it now appeared, he had been at his best when he was most nearly autobiographical: those vivid early stories had come from the lives of his own family or of their neighbors; _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ had set forth what was practically his own experience in its account of a heroine--not hero--who leaves her native farm to go first to a country college and then to Chicago to pursue a wider life, torn constantly between a passion for freedom and a loyalty to the father she must tragically desert.

In a sense _A Son of the Middle Border_ supersedes the fictive versions of the same material; they are the original documents and the _Son_ the final redaction and commentary. Veracious still, the son of that border appears no longer vexed as formerly. Memory, parent of art, has at once sweetened and enlarged the scene. What has been lost of pungent vividness has its compensation in a broader, a more philosophic interpretation of the old frontier, which in this record grows to epic meanings and dimensions. Its savage hardships, though never minimized, take their due place in its powerful history; the defeat which the victims underwent cannot rob the victors of their many claims to glory. If there was little contentment in this border there was still much rapture. Such things Mr. Garland reveals without saying them too plainly: the epic qualities of his book--as in Mark Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_--lie in its implications; the tale itself is a candid narrative of his own adventures through childhood, youth, and his first literary period.

This autobiographic method, applied with success in _A Daughter of the Middle Border_ to his later life in Chicago and all the regions which he visited, brings into play his higher gifts and excludes his lower. Under slight obligation to imagine, he runs slight risk of succumbing to those conventionalisms which often stiffen his work when he trusts to his imagination. Avowedly dealing with his own opinions and experiences, he is not tempted to project them, as in the novels he does somewhat too frequently, into the careers of his heroes. Dealing chiefly with action not with thought, he does not tend so much as elsewhere to solve speculative problems with sentiment instead of with reflection. In the _Son_ and the _Daughter_ he has the fullest chance to be autobiographic without disguise.

Here lies his best province and here appears his best art. It is an art, as he employs it, no less subtle than humane. Warm, firm flesh covers the bones of his chronology. He imparts reality to this or that occasion, like a novelist, by reciting conversation which must come from something besides bare memory. He rounds out the characters of the persons he remembers with a fulness and grace which, lifelike as his persons are, betray the habit of creating characters. He enriches his analysis of the Middle Border with sensitive descriptions of the "large, unconscious scenery" in which it transacted its affairs. If it is difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with which the chronicle was set down.

2. WINSTON CHURCHILL

The tidal wave of historical romance which toward the end of the past century attacked this coast and broke so far inland as to inundate the entire continent swept Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of popularity to which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by the exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic than those which first lifted him above the flood. He came during a moment of national expansiveness. Patriotism and jingoism, altruism and imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook the temper which had been slowly stiffening since the Civil War. Now, with a rush of unaccustomed emotions, the national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating in it, not to say wallowing in it.

In Mr. Churchill it found a romancer full of consolation to any who might fear or suspect that the country's history did not quite match its destiny. He had enough erudition to lend a very considerable "thickness" to his scene, whether it was Annapolis or St. Louis or Kentucky or upland New England. He had a sense for the general bearings of this or that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears had expressed themselves. And he had, besides all these qualities needed to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness which imparted to them the look of moral significance. Richard Carvel by the exercise of simple Maryland virtues rises above the enervate young sparks of Mayfair; Stephen Brice in _The Crisis_ by his simple Yankee virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels--who, however, are gallant and noble though misguided men; canny David Ritchie in _The Crossing_ leads the frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of fable leads the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in _Coniston_, though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and consequently of constituents, surrenders his ugly power at the touch of a maiden's hand.

To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color and moral earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill owes to the elements injected into American life by Theodore Roosevelt. Is not _The Crossing_--to take specific illustrations--connected with the same central cycle as _The Winning of the West_? Is not _Coniston_, whatever the date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption which Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negligence and against which he urged the duty of an awakened civic conscience? In time Mr. Churchill was to extend his inquiries to regions of speculation into which Roosevelt never ventured, but as regards American history and American politics they were of one mind. "Nor are the ethics of the manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama and the Canal," wrote Mr. Churchill in 1918 in his essay on _The American Contribution and the Democratic Idea_, "wholly defensible from the point of view of international democracy. Yet it must be remembered that President Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile government, and that the Canal had become a necessity not only for our own development, but for that of the civilization of the world." And again: "The only real peril confronting democracy is the arrest of growth."

Roosevelt himself could not have muddled an issue better. Like him Mr. Churchill has habitually moved along the main lines of national feeling--believing in America and democracy with a fealty unshaken by any adverse evidence and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto rarely modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence. Morally he has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been naïve and belated. Whether he has been writing what was avowedly romance or what was intended to be sober criticism he has been always the romancer first and the critic afterwards.

And yet since the vogue of historical romance passed nearly a score of years ago Mr. Churchill has honestly striven to keep up with the world by thinking about it. One novel after another has presented some encroaching problem of American civic or social life: the control of politics by interest in _Mr. Crewe's Career_; divorce in _A Modern Chronicle_; the conflict between Christianity and business in _The Inside of the Cup_; the oppression of the soul by the lust for temporal power in _A Far Country_; the struggle of women with the conditions of modern industry in _The Dwelling-Place of Light_. Nothing has hurried Mr. Churchill or forced his hand; he has taken two or three years for each novel, has read widely, has brooded over his theme, has reinforced his stories with solid documentation. He has aroused prodigious discussion of his challenges and solutions--particularly in the case of _The Inside of the Cup_. That novel perhaps best of all exhibits his later methods. John Hodder by some miracle of inattention or some accident of isolation has been kept in his country parish from any contact with the doubt which characterizes his age. Transferred to a large city he almost instantly finds in himself heresies hitherto only latent, spends a single summer among the poor, and in the fall begins relentless war against the unworthy rich among his congregation. Thought plays but a trivial part in Hodder's evolution. Had he done any real thinking or were he capable of it he must long before have freed himself from the dogmas that obstruct him. Instead he has drifted with the general stream and learns not from the leaders but from the slower followers of opinion. Like the politician he absorbs through his skin, gathering premonitions as to which way the crowd is going and then rushing off in that direction.

If this recalls the processes of Roosevelt, hardly less does it recall those of Mr. Churchill. Once taken by an idea for a novel he has always burned with it as if it were as new to the world as to him. Here lies, without much question, the secret of that genuine earnestness which pervades all his books: he writes out of the contagious passion of a recent convert or a still excited discoverer. Here lies, too, without much question, the secret of Mr. Churchill's success in holding his audiences: a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in. Never once has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off alone.

Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs intellectually to a middle class which is neither very subtle nor very profound on the one hand nor very shrewd or very downright on the other, it is impossible to withhold from Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his lights. If he has not overheard the keenest voices of his age, neither has he listened to the voice of the mob. The sounds which have reached him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill.

In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in some mounting aspiration opposed to a static régime, whether the passion for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised already--the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in politics. Rarely is anything really thought out. Compare, for instance, his epic of matrimony, _A Modern Chronicle_, with such a penetrating--if satirical--study as _The Custom of the Country_. Mrs. Wharton urges no more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the _Custom_ is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the _Chronicle_ has little more to say than that after two exciting marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning. In _A Far Country_ a lawyer who has let himself be made a tool in the hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic love affair, suffers conversion, reads a few books of modern speculation, and resolutely turns his face toward a new order. In the same precipitate fashion the heroine of _The Dwelling-Place of Light_, who has given no apparent thought whatever to economic problems except as they touch her individually, suffers a shock in connection with her intrigue with her capitalist employer and becomes straightway a radical, shortly thereafter making a pathetic and edifying end in childbirth. In these books there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated sentiments; the author's sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably right; but taken as a whole his most serious novels, however lifelike and well rounded their surfaces may seem, lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought.

Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intellectual consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever building a very notable realistic plot has kept him from ever creating any very memorable characters. The author of ten novels, immensely popular for more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single figure--man or woman--generally accepted by the public as either a type or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis personae from without and--doubtless for that reason--has apparently felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his plots. Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, something cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge Whipple of _The Crisis_, above all something both tough and quaint in the up-country politician Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ resisted the argumentative knife and saved for those particular persons that look of being entities in their own right which distinguishes the authentic from the artificial characters of fiction.

For the most part, however, Mr. Churchill has erred in what may be called the arithmetic of his art: he has thought of men and women as mere fractions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but romances must be the units and the total work the sum or product of the fictive operation. Naturally he has succeeded rather worse with characters of his own creating, since his conceptions in such cases have come to him as social or political problems to be illustrated in the conduct of beings suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some measure from history, with their individualities already more or less established. Without achieving fresh or bold interpretations of John Paul Jones or George Rogers Clark or Lincoln, Mr. Churchill has added a good deal to the vividness of their legends; whereas in the case of characters not quite so historical, such as Judge Whipple and Jethro Bass, he has admirably fused his moral earnestness regarding American politics with his sense of spaciousness and color in the American past.

After the most careful reflection upon Mr. Churchill's successive studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly to his romances. He possesses, and has more than once displayed, a true romantic--almost a true epic--instinct. Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen Brice and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession and reverberation of stirring days. Nearer a Walter Scott than a Bernard Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing to take the memories of his nation as they have come down to him and to work them without question or rejection into his broad tapestry. A naturalistic generation is tempted to make light of such methods; they belong, however, too truly to good traditions of literature to be overlooked.

A national past has many uses, and different dispositions find in it instruction or warning, depression or exaltation. Mr. Churchill has found in the American past a cause for exaltation chiefly; after his ugliest chapters the light breaks and he closes always upon the note of high confidence which resounds in the epics of robust, successful nations. If in this respect he has too regularly flattered his countrymen, he has also enriched the national consciousness by the colors which he has brought back from his impassioned forays. Only now and then, it must be remembered, do historical novels pass in their original form from one generation to another; more frequently they suffer a decomposition due to their lack of essential truth and descend to the function of compost for succeeding harvests of romance. Though probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill's books--perhaps not even one--can be expected to outlast a generation with much vitality, he cannot be denied the honor of having added something agreeable if imponderable to the national memory and so of having served his country in one real way if not in another.

3. ROBERT HERRICK

If the novels of Robert Herrick were nothing else they would still be indispensable documents upon that first and second decade of the twentieth century in America, when a minority unconvinced by either romance or Roosevelt set out to scrutinize the exuberant complacence which was becoming a more and more ominous element in the national character. Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense potentiality in it.

Small wonder then that the prevailing literature gave itself generally to large proclamations about the future or to spacious recollections of the past in which the note was hope unmodified. Small wonder either--be it said to the credit of literature--that the same period caused and saw the development of the most emphatic protest which has come from native pens since the abolition of slavery--not excepting even the literary rebels of the eighties. Much of that protest naturally expressed itself in fiction, of many orders of intelligence and competence and intention. Various voices have been louder or shriller or sweeter or in some cases more thoroughgoing than Mr. Herrick's; but his is the voice which, in fiction, has best represented the scholar's conscience disturbed by the spectacle of a tumultuous generation of which most of the members are too much undisturbed.

In particular Mr. Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears to be all of a woman's life that can interest the popular fiction-mongers. He knows, without anywhere putting it precisely into words, that the elaborate language of compliment used by Americans toward women, though deriving perhaps from a time when women were less numerous on the frontier than men and were therefore specially prized and praised, has become for the most part a hollow language. The pioneer woman earned all the respect she got by the equal share she bore in the tasks of her laborious world. Her successor in the comfortable society which the frontier founded by its travail neither works nor breeds as those first women did. But the energy thus happily released, instead of being directed into other useful channels, has been encouraged to spend itself upon the complex arts of the parasite.

Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage after centuries of disadvantage--ascribe it to whatever one will, the fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks--although here a change has taken place since Mr. Herrick began to chronicle her--the confident impulse to follow her own path as an individual, irrespective of her peculiar functions. It must be remembered, of course, that Mr. Herrick has had in mind not the vast majority of women, who in the United States as everywhere else on earth still fully participate in life, but the American Woman, that traditional figure compounded of timid ice and dainty insolence and habitually tricked out with a wealth which holds the world so far away that it cannot see how empty she really is. He has sought in his novels, by dissecting the pretty simulacrum, to show that it has little blood and less soul.

At times he writes with a biting animus. In _One Woman's Life_ Milly schemes herself out of the plain surroundings into which she was born, lapses from her designs enough to marry a poor man for love but subsequently wrecks his career and wears him out by her ambitious ignorance, and before she ends the story in the arms of another husband has contrived to waste the savings of a friend of her own sex who tries to help her. In _The Healer_ the doctor's wife continually drags him back from the passionate exercise of his true gift, luring him with her beauty to live in the world which nearly destroys him, though he finally comprehends the danger and escapes her. And in _Together_, its epic canvas crowded with all kinds and conditions of lovers and married couples, Mr. Herrick never spares the type. Other novelists may be content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral development. Hard and wilful enough, she never becomes mature, and she tangles the web of life with the heedless hands of a child.

A less reflective novelist might be content with blaming or satirizing her for her blind instinct to marry her richest suitor; for forcing him, once married, to support her and her children at a pitch of luxury which demands that he give up his personal aspirations in art or science or altruism; for struggling so ruthlessly to plant her daughters in prosperous soil which will nourish the "sacred seed" of the race abundantly. Mr. Herrick, however, does not disapprove such instincts for their own sake. He sees in them an element furnishing mankind with one of its valuable sources of stability. What he assails is a national conception which endows women with these instincts in mean, trivial, unenlightened forms.

His criticism of the American Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely pretenses. It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him. In _The Common Lot_, in _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, in _Clark's Field_, and in certain of the strands of _Together_ it is the women who demand that, no matter what happens, they shall be allowed to live their lives upon the high plane of integrity from which the casual world is always trying to pull men and women down. Integrity in love, integrity in personal conduct, integrity in business and public affairs--this Mr. Herrick holds to with a profound, at times a bleak, consistency which has both worried and limited his readers. Integrity in love leads Margaret Pole in _Together_, for instance, from her foolish husband to her lover during one lyric episode and thereafter holds them apart in the consciousness of a love completed and not to be touched with perishable flesh. In novel after novel the characters come to grief from the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents it, seems a serious offense against integrity--springing from a failure to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of superfluous things until it ceases to be itself. And with never wearied iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation to get easy wealth and cut a false figure in the world.

Possibly it was a youth spent in New England that made Mr. Herrick as sensitive as he has been to the atmosphere of affairs in Chicago, where fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil. Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure which Americans take in Europe. But Chicago is the true center of his universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring village so rapidly turned town. He has not, however, been blown with the prevailing winds. The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage. Something in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk with opportunity.

Is it the scholar in him, or the New Englander, or the moralist which has compelled him to count the moral cost of material expansion? In the first of his novels to win much of a hearing, _The Common Lot_, he studies the career of an architect who becomes involved in the frauds of dishonest builders and sacrifices his professional integrity for the sake of quick, dangerous profits. _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, a precious document now too much neglected, follows a country youth of good initial impulses through his rise and progress among the packers and on to the Senate of the United States. This is one of the oldest themes in literature, one of the themes most certain to succeed with any public: Dick Whittington, the Industrious Apprentice, over again. Mr. Herrick, however, cannot merely repeat the old drama or point the old moral. His hero wriggles upward by devious ways and sharp practices, crushing competitors, diverting justice, and gradually paying for his fortune with his integrity. In the most modern idiom Mr. Herrick asks again and again the ancient question whether the whole world is worth as much as a man's soul.

That mystical rigor which permits but one answer to the question suggests to Mr. Herrick two avenues of cure from the evils accompanying the disease he broods upon. One is a return to simple living under conditions which quiet the restless nerves, allay the greedy appetites, and restore the central will. The Master in _The Master of the Inn_, Renault in _Together_, Holden in _The Healer_--all of them utter and live a gospel of health which obviously corresponds to Mr. Herrick's belief. When the world grows too loud one may withdraw from it; there are still uncrowded spaces where existence marches simply. Remembering them, Mr. Herrick's imagination, held commonly on so tight a fist, slips its hood off and takes wing. And yet he knows that the north woods into which a few favored men and women may withdraw are not cure enough for the multitude. They must practise, or some one must practise for their benefit, honorable refusals in the midst of life. The architect's wife in _The Common Lot_, Harrington's sister in _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, the clear-eyed Johnstons in _Together_--they have or attain the knowledge, which seems a paradox, that selfishness can fatally entangle the individual in the perplexities of existence and that the best chance for disentanglement may come from intelligent unselfishness.

_Clark's Field_ amply illustrates this paradox. The field has for many years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a well-meant law has grown malevolent, resolve to break the spell by surrendering their selfish interests and accepting the position of unselfish trustees to the estate until--if that time ever comes--some better means may be devised for making the earth serve the purposes of those who live upon it.

The solution does not entirely satisfy, of course. At best it is a makeshift if considered in its larger bearings. It comes near, however, to solving the problems as individuals of Adelle and her cousin, who save more in character than they lose in pocket. And it might possibly have come nearer still were it not for the handicap under which Mr. Herrick, for all his intelligence and conscience, has labored as an artist. That handicap is a certain stiffness on the plastic side of his imagination. His conceptions come to him, if criticism can be any judge, with a large touch of the abstract about them; his rationalizing intelligence is always present at their birth. Nor do his narratives, once under way, flow with the sure, effortless movement which is natural to born story-tellers. His imagination, not quite continuous enough, occasionally fails to fuse and shape disparate materials. It is likely to fall short when he essays fancy or mystery, as in _A Life for a Life_; or when he has a whimsy for amusing melodrama, as in _His Great Adventure_. The flexibility which reveals itself in humor or in the lighter irony is not one of his principal endowments. Restrained and direct as he always is so far as language goes, he cannot always keep his action absolutely in hand: this or that person or incident now and then breaks out of the pattern; the skeleton of a formula now and then becomes too prominent.

It is his intelligence which makes his satire sharp and significant; it is his conscience which lends passion to his representation and lifts him often to a true if sober eloquence. But in at least two of his novels imagination takes him, as only imagination can take a novelist, beyond the reach of either intelligence or conscience. _Together_, a little cumbersome, a little sprawling, nevertheless glows with an intensity which gives off heat as well as light. It is more than an exhaustive document upon modern marriage; it is interpretation as well. _Clark's Field_, a sparer, clearer story, is even more than interpretation; it is a work of art springing from a spirit which has taken fire and has transmuted almost all its abstract conceptions into genuine flesh and blood. That _Clark's Field_ is Mr. Herrick's latest novel heightens the expectation with which one hears that after a silence of seven years he now plans to return to fiction.

4. UPTON SINCLAIR

The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art. In his youth he was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly confident. His first character--the hero of _Springtime and Harvest_ and of _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_--belonged to the lamenting race of the minor poets, shaped his beauty in deep seclusion, and died because it went unrecognized. Mr. Sinclair, though he had created Stirling in his own image, did not die. Instead he began to study the causes of public deafness and found the injustices which ever since he has devoted his enormous energy to exposing. If that original motive seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent ardor to his crusade. And if he had not discovered so much injustice to chronicle--if there had not been so much for him to discover--he must have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought.

As the evidences have accumulated he has been spared the need of complaining merely because another minor poet was neglected and has been able to widen his accusations until they include the whole multitude of oppressions which free spirits have to contend against when they face machines and privilege and mortmain. The industrial system which true prophets have unanimously condemned for a century and a half helped to pack Mr. Sinclair's records from the first; the war, with its vast hysteria and blind panic, made it superfluous for him to add much commentary in _Jimmie Higgins_ and _100%_ to the veritable episodes which he there recounted. On some occasions fact itself has the impetus of propaganda. The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool, dangerous art of Thomas Paine.

To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw. An expansive passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has written. By disposition very obviously a poet, working with no subtle or complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr. Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on questioning it forever. _Samuel the Seeker_ seems a kind of allegory of its author's own career. He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott, inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that something or other be done at once. These are the methods of the ragged philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and cynical.

Naïve inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities for comfort. How can any one talk of the long ages of human progress when a child may starve to death in a few days? How can any one take refuge in irony when agony is always abroad, biting and rending? How can any one leave to others the obligation to assail injustice when the responsibility for it lies equally upon all, whether victims or victors, who permit it to continue? A questioner so relentless can very soon bore the questioned, especially if they are less strenuous or less inflamed than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any of Mr. Sinclair's better books can stay complacent only by shutting up the book and his mind again.

Without doubt the various abuses which these books set forth have their case seriously weakened by the violent quickness with which Mr. Sinclair scents conspiracy among the enemies of justice. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has himself, as his personal history in _The Brass Check_ makes clear enough, been practically conspired against. But some instinct for melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention.

In _Love's Pilgrimage_, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself heard. In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant genius down. Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but those who are straining at a similar leash. So also in _The Profits of Religion_--which is to the present age what _The Age of Reason_ was to an earlier revolutionary generation--Mr. Sinclair excessively simplifies religious history by reducing almost the whole process to a conspiracy on the part of priestcraft to hoodwink the people and so to fatten its own greedy purse. He must know that the process has not been quite so simple; but, leaving to others to say the things that all will say, he studies "supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to privilege." Here again his instincts and methods as a melodramatist assert themselves: he warms to the struggle and plays his lash upon his conspiring priests in a mood of mingled duty and delight.

_The Profits of Religion_ and _The Brass Check_ belong to a series of treatises on the economic interpretation of culture which will later examine education and literature as these two have examined the church and journalism and which collectively will bear the title _The Dead Hand_. Against the malign domination of the present by the past Mr. Sinclair directs his principal assault. In the arts he sees the dead hand holding the classics on their thrones and thrusting back new masterpieces as they appear; in religion he sees it clothing the visions of ancient poets in steel creeds and rituals and denying that such visions can ever come to later spirits; in human society he sees it welding the manacles of caste and hardening this or that temporary pattern of life to a perpetual order. As he repeatedly suspects conspiracy where none exists, so he repeatedly suspects deliberate malice where he should perceive stupidity.

Now stupidity, though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can devise, is less employable as a villain: it is not anthropomorphic enough for melodrama. Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual. Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels more than a rational man's contempt for the imbecility of parents who will not instruct their daughters in anything but the sentimental elements of sex; he feels the fury toward them that audiences feel toward villains. It is much the same with his rather absurd novels written to display the follies of fashionable life, _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_: he finds more crime than folly in the extravagant pursuit of pleasure on the part of the few while the many endure hunger and cold, homelessness and joblessness, ignorance and rebellion and premature decay. Though the satirists may smile at the silly few, the ragged philosophers must weep for the miserable many.

Class-consciousness is a great advantage to the writer of exciting fiction, as numerous American novelists have shown--standing ordinarily, however, on the side of the privileged orders. Mr. Sinclair in _The Jungle_, his great success, taking his stand with the unprivileged, with the wretched aliens in the Chicago stockyards, had the advantage that he could represent his characters as actually contending against the conspiracy which always exists when the exploiters of men see the exploited growing restless. What outraged the public was the news, later confirmed by official investigation, that the meat of a large part of the world was being prepared, at great profit to the packers, under conditions abominably unhygienic; what outraged Mr. Sinclair was the spectacle of the lives which the workers in the yards were compelled to lead if they got work--which meant life to them--at all. Thanks to the conspiracy among their masters they could not help themselves; thanks to the weight of the dead hand they could get no help from popular opinion, which saw their plight as something essential to the very structure of society, as Aristotle saw slavery. Mr. Sinclair proclaimed with a ringing voice that their plight was not essential; and he prophesied the revolution with an eloquence which, though the revolution has not come, still warms and lifts the raw material with which he had to deal.

Nothing about him has done more to make him an arresting novelist than his conviction that mankind has not yet reached its peak, as the pessimists think; and that the current stage of civilization, with all that is unendurable about it, need last no longer than till the moment when mankind determines that it need no longer endure. He speaks as a socialist who has dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present them with appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and generous hopes.

How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in the contrast between _Manassas_ and _100%_; the two books illustrate the range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a generation. _Manassas_ is the work of a man filled with epic memories and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American picture Mr. Sinclair in _Jimmie Higgins_, the story of a socialist who went to war against the Kaiser, showed traces still of a romantic pulse, settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat. It is the colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature that suggests both ice and fire. Rarely has such irony been maintained in an entire volume as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of noncombatants during the war. To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of Virginia poured itself out in unstinting sacrifice; and, though the sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter how great a distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does not answer his question: his art has gone, at least for the moment, beyond avowed argument, merely marshaling the evidence with ironic skill and dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great war.

The road for Mr. Sinclair to travel is the road of irony and documentation, both of which will hold him back from ineffectual rages and thereby serve to enlarge his influence. Such genius for controversy as his may be neither expected nor advised to look for quieter paths; it feels, with Bernard Shaw, that "if people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must." It is fair to say, however, that certain readers heartily sympathetic toward Mr. Sinclair observe in him a painful tendency to enjoy scandal for its own sake and to generalize from it to an extent which hurts his cause; observe in him a quite superfluous gusto when it comes to reporting bloody incidents not always contributory to any general design; observe in him a frequent over-use of the shout and the scream. He has himself given an example--_100%_--on which such critical strictures are based; in that best of his novels as well as best of his arguments he has avoided most of his own defects.

A revolutionary novelist naturally finds it difficult to represent his world with the quiet grasp with which it can be represented by one who, accepting the present frame of life, has studied it curiously, affectionately, until it has left a firm, substantial image in the mind. The revolutionist must see life as constantly whirling and melting under his gaze; he must bring to light many facts which the majority overlook but which it will seem to him like connivance with injustice to leave in hiding; he must go constantly beyond what is to what ought to be. All the more reason, then, why he should be as watchful as the most watchful artist in his choice and use of the modes of his particular art. It requires at least as much art to convert as to give pleasure.

5. THEODORE DREISER

Much concerned about wisdom as Theodore Dreiser is, he almost wholly lacks the dexterous knowingness which has marked the mass of fiction in the age of O. Henry. Not only has Mr. Dreiser never allowed any one else to make up his mind for him regarding the significance and aims and obligations of mankind but he has never made up his mind himself. A large dubitancy colors all his reflections. "All we know is that we cannot know." The only law about which we can be reasonably certain is the law of change. Justice is "an occasional compromise struck in an eternal battle." Virtue and honesty are "a system of weights and measures, balances struck between man and man."

Prudence no less than philosophy demands, then, that we hold ourselves constantly in readiness to discard our ancient creeds and habits and step valiantly around the corner beyond which reality will have drifted even while we were building our houses on what seemed the primeval and eternal rock. Tides of change rise from deeps below deeps; cosmic winds of change blow upon us from boundless chaos; mountains, in the long geologic seasons, shift and flow like clouds; and the everlasting heavens may some day be shattered by the explosion or pressure of new circumstances. Somewhere in the scheme man stands punily on what may be an Ararat rising out of the abyss or only a promontory of the moment sinking back again; there all his strength is devoted to a dim struggle for survival. How in this flickering universe shall man claim for himself the honors of any important antiquity or any important destiny? What, in this vast accident, does human dignity amount to?

For a philosopher with views so wide it is difficult to be a dramatist or a novelist. If he is consistent the most portentous human tragedy must seem to him only a tiny gasp for breath, the most delightful human comedy only a tiny flutter of joy. Against a background of suns dying on the other side of Aldebaran any mole trodden upon by some casual hoof may appear as significant a personage as an Oedipus or a Lear in his last agony. To be a novelist or dramatist at all such a cosmic philosopher must contract his vision to the little island we inhabit, must adjust his interest to mortal proportions and concerns, must match his narrative to the scale by which we ordinarily measure our lives. The muddle of elements so often obvious in Mr. Dreiser's work comes from the conflict within him of huge, expansive moods and a conscience working hard to be accurate in its representation of the most honest facts of manners and character.

Granted, he might reasonably argue, that the plight and stature of all mankind are essentially so mean, the novelist need not seriously bother himself with the task of looking about for its heroic figures. Plain stories of plain people are as valuable as any others. Since all larger doctrines and ideals are likely to be false in a precarious world, it is best to stick as close as possible to the individual. When the individual is sincere he has at least some positive attributes; his record may have a genuine significance for others if it is presented with absolute candor. Indeed, we can partially escape from the general meaninglessness of life at large by being or studying individuals who are sincere, and who are therefore the origins and centers of some kind of reality.

That the sincerity which Mr. Dreiser practises differs in some respects from that of any other American novelist, no matter how truthful, must be referred to one special quality of his own temperament. Historically he has his fellows: he belongs with the movement toward naturalism which came to America when Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, partly as a protest against the bland realism which Howells expounded, were dissenting in their various dialects from the reticences and the romances then current. Personally Mr. Dreiser displays, almost alone among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a better native term we have to call the peasant type--the type to which Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to.

Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of village habits and prejudices--still he carries wherever he goes the true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity. How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short story _When the Old Century Was New_, an attempt to reconstruct in fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes _A Traveler at Forty_ so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr. Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt terms before he speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and intricate themes--finance and sex and art--which interest him above all others.

On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance. The career of Cowperwood in _The Financier_ and _The Titan_, a career notoriously based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise his virtue of patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues generally to convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood's business enterprises. The American financier, after all, has rarely had much subtlety in his make-up. Single-minded, tough-skinned, ruthless, "suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and the like are invented," he shoulders and hurls his bulk through a sea of troubles and carries off his spoils. Such a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. Dreiser understands. He understands the march of desire to its goal. He seems always to have been curious regarding the large operations of finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the intoxication of golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in _The Jew of Malta_, and on his cynical side struck by the mechanism of craft and courage and indomitable impulse which the financier employs. Mr. Dreiser writes, it is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the naïve hand of a peasant--even though a peasant of genius--wondering how great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at the mystery. And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all sure of the prize. As it is, this Trilogy of Desire (never completed in the third part which was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray into London) is as considerable an epic as American business has yet to show.

Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous as those of the leader of some four-footed herd. In this respect the novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular _Sister Carrie_ and _Jennie Gerhardt_, both of them annals of women who fall as easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand of the conquering male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover. No moralism overlays the biology of these novels. Sex in them is a free-flowing, expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually at war with the rules and taboos which have been devised by mankind to hold its amative impulses within convenient bounds. To the cosmic philosopher what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate moment?

Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods of sex. At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its vagrant hours. For this his favorite situation is in large part responsible: that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and immediately compliant to his advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth--an obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits. What he most conspicuously leaves out of account is the will and personality of women, whom he sees, or at least represents, with hardly any exceptions as mere fools of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no separate identities till some lover shapes them. To something like this simplicity the rôle of women in love is reduced by those Boccaccian fabulists who adorn the village taproom and the corner grocery.

Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider _The 'Genius'_, a massive, muddy, powerful narrative, his greatest novel, though as a matter of fact it cannot be compared with _Sister Carrie_ for insight or accuracy or charm. His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination toward the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero and half picaro. Witla remains mediocre enough in all but his sexual unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving force more or less like those forces which impel Cowperwood. The will to wealth, the will to love, the will to art--Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind energies with no goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit. Particularly is this true of his representation of the careers of artists. Carrie becomes a noted actress in a few short weeks; Witla almost as rapidly becomes a noted illustrator; other minor characters here and there in the novels are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it. Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing analysis of the mysterious behavior of true genius. Mr. Dreiser's artists are hardly persons at all; they are creatures driven, and the wonder lies primarily in the impelling energy. The cosmic philosopher in him sees the beginning and the end of the artistic process better than the novelist in him sees its methods. And the peasant in him, though it knows the world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investigated that world at first hand, still leads him to report it in terms often quaint, melodramatic, invincibly rural. Witness the hundreds of times he calls things "artistic."

Two of his latest books indicate the range of his gifts and his excellences. In _Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub_, which he calls A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, he undertook to expound his general philosophy and produced the most negligible of all his works. He has no faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he begins to reason he is less than half himself. In _Twelve Men_, on the other hand, he displays the qualities by virtue of which he attracts and deserves a serious attention. Rarely generalizing, he portrays a dozen actual persons he has known, all his honesty brought to the task of making his account fit the reality exactly, and all his large tolerance exercised to present the truth without malice or excuses. Here lies the field of his finest victories, here and in those adjacent tracts of other books which are nearest this simple method: his representation of old Gerhardt and of Aaron Berchansky in _The Hand of the Potter_; numerous sketches of character in that broad pageant _A Hoosier Holiday_; the tenderly conceived record of Caroline Meeber, wispy and witless as she often is; the masterly study of Hurstwood's deterioration in _Sister Carrie_--this last the peak among all Mr. Dreiser's successes.

Not the incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merciless verbosity nor his too frequent interposition of crude argument can destroy the effect which he produces at his best--that of an eminent spirit brooding over a world which in spite of many condemnations he deeply, somberly loves. Something peasant-like in his genius may blind him a little to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling the plain truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, as much as he loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls over which he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are, he has come to them from long flights, and has brought back a lifted vision which enriches his drab narratives. Something spacious, something now lurid now luminous, surrounds them. From somewhere sound accents of an authority not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a thinker of the widest views to contract himself to the dimensions needed for naturalistic art, and though he may often fail when he attempts it, when he does succeed he has the opportunity, which the mere worldling lacks, of ennobling his art with some of the great light of the poets.