English
newspapers have echoed the alarmed American discovery that he is a
literary agent of the Wilhelmstrasse, but it is to the honour of the
English that this imbecility has got no countenance from reputable
authority and has not injured his position.

At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate. When criticism is not
merely an absurd effort to chase him out of court because his ideas are
not orthodox, as the Victorians tried to chase out Darwin and Swinburne,
and their predecessors pursued Shelley and Byron, it is too often
designed to identify him with some branch or other of "radical"
poppycock, and so credit him with purposes he has never imagined. Thus
Chautauqua pulls and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle ground
there proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of him by labelling him.
One faction maintains that he is a realist; another calls him a
naturalist; a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist.
This debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has
come a valuation by Lawrence Gilman[29] which perhaps strikes very close
to the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman, "a sentimental mystic who employs
the mimetic gestures of the realist." This judgment is apt in particular
and sound in general. No such thing as a pure method is possible in the
novel. Plain realism, as in Gorky's "Nachtasyl" and the war stories of
Ambrose Bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if we
ever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their artistic
combination, as in life itself, that fetches us--the subtle projection
of the concrete muddle that is living against the ideal orderliness that
we reach out for--the eternal war of experience and aspiration--the
contrast between the world as it is and the world as it might be or
ought to be. Dreiser describes the thing that he sees, laboriously and
relentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is behind it. "He
gives you," continues Mr. Gilman, "a sense of actuality; but he gives
you more than that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoric
irrelevancies, ... emerges a sense of the infinite sadness and mystery
of human life."...[30]

"To see truly," said Renan, "is to see dimly." Dimness or mystery, call
it what you will: it is in all these overgrown and formless, but
profoundly moving books. Just what do they mean? Just what is Dreiser
driving at? That such questions should be asked is only a proof of the
straits to which