ining, an aristocrat. He has the gift of
emotional detachment. The lures of facile doctrine do not move him. In
his irony there is a disdain which plays about even the ironist himself.
Dreiser is a product of far different forces and traditions, and is
capable of no such escapement. Struggle as he may, and fume and protest
as he may, he can no more shake off the chains of his intellectual and
cultural heritage than he can change the shape of his nose. What that
heritage is you may find out in detail by reading "A Hoosier Holiday,"
or in summary by glancing at the first few pages of "Life, Art and
America." Briefly described, it is the burden of a believing mind, a
moral attitude, a lingering superstition. One-half of the man's brain,
so to speak, wars with the other half. He is intelligent, he is
thoughtful, he is a sound artist--but there come moments when a dead
hand falls upon him, and he is once more the Indiana peasant, snuffing
absurdly over imbecile sentimentalities, giving a grave ear to
quackeries, snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. One
generation spans too short a time to free the soul of man. Nietzsche, to
the end of his days, remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hence
two-thirds a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end,
into a sort of holy war. Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher,
reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its
ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. And that
other English novelist who springs from the servants' hall--let us not
be surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like a bounder.

The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the transition stage
between Christian Endeavour and civilization, between Warsaw, Indiana
and the Socratic grove, between being a good American and being a free
man, and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a moral
sentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant revolt. "The 'Genius,'" on
the one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a Warning to the Young;
its motto might be _Scheut die Dirnen_! And on the other hand, it is
full of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by imagining
the author as heroically determined to prove that he is a plain-spoken
fellow and his own man, let the chips fall where they may. So, in spots,
in "The Financier" and "The Titan," both of them far better books. There
is an almost moral frenzy to expose and riddle what passes