pedagogy has brought criticism. The answer is simple:
he is driving at nothing, he is merely trying to represent what he sees
and feels. His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to
expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure inner necessity" of which
Conrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist,
standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life,
enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness,
challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of
what passes understanding. And _jenseits von Gut und Boese_. "For
myself," says Dreiser, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is,
what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and I do
not doubt any one absolutely. I think people are both evil and
well-intentioned." The hatching of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it is
the flat rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that outrages petty
minds; not being "good," he must be "evil"--as William Blake said of
Milton, a true poet is always "of the devil's party." But in that very
groping toward a light but dimly seen there is a measure, it seems to
me, of Dreiser's rank and consideration as an artist. "Now comes the
public," says Hermann Bahr, "and demands that we explain what the poet
is trying to say. The answer is this: If we knew exactly he would not be
a poet...."

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Fuller's comparative obscurity is one of the strangest phenomena of
American letters. Despite his high achievement, he is seldom discussed,
or even mentioned. Back in 1899 he was already so far forgotten that
William Archer mistook his name, calling him Henry Y. Puller. _Vide_
Archer's pamphlet, The American Language; New York, 1899.

[17] For example, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, which
runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10,000 pages,
Huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and his remarkable
mastery of English is barely mentioned in passing. His two debates with
Gladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of the century, are
not noticed at all.

[18] A Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas. Scribner's
Sons, 1909.

[19] New York, 1917; reprinted from _The Seven Arts_ for Feb., 1917.

[20] Life, Art and America, p. 5.

[21] The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday.

[22] A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900.

[23] New York, The Century Co., 1916.

[24] In _The Se