as savant. There is something
of the icy aloofness of the laboratory in him, even when the images he
conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. He is almost as
self-conscious as the Beethoven of the last quartets. In Dreiser the
thing is more intimate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure feeling.
He gets his effects, one might almost say, not by designing them, but by
living them.

But whatever the process, the power of the image evoked is not to be
gainsaid. It is not only brilliant on the surface, but mysterious and
appealing in its depths. One swiftly forgets his intolerable writing,
his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the Athenian
tragedy he instils into his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his
barbaric pirates of finances, his conquered and hamstrung supermen, his
wives who sit and wait. He has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depicting
the spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jennie Gerhardt," is
alone worth all the _dramatis personae_ of popular American fiction
since the days of "Rob o' the Bowl"; Howells could no more have created
him, in his Rodinesque impudence of outline, than he could have created
Tartuffe or Gargantua. Such a novel as "Sister Carrie" stands quite
outside the brief traffic of the customary stage. It leaves behind it an
unescapable impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is not
a mere story, not a novel in the customary American meaning of the word;
it is at once a psalm of life and a criticism of life--and that
criticism loses nothing by the fact that its burden is despair. Here,
precisely, is the point of Dreiser's departure from his fellows. He puts
into his novels a touch of the eternal _Weltschmerz_. They get below the
drama that is of the moment and reveal the greater drama that is without
end. They arouse those deep and lasting emotions which grow out of the
recognition of elemental and universal tragedy. His aim is not merely to
tell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces which
sway and condition human destiny. One cannot imagine him consenting to
Conan Doyle's statement of the purpose of fiction, quoted with
characteristic approval by the New York _Times_: "to amuse mankind, to
help the sick and the dull and the weary." Nor is his purpose to
instruct; if he is a pedagogue it is only incidentally and as a
weakness. The thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. One
does not arise from such a book as "