erious consideration. Norris, in his day, swung even lower--for
example, in "A Man's Woman" and in some of his short stories. He was a
pioneer, perhaps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and the evil
lures of popular success lay all about him. It is no wonder that he
sometimes seemed to lose his direction.

Emile Zola is another literary father whose paternity grows dubious on
examination. I once printed an article exposing what seemed to me to be
a Zolaesque attitude of mind, and even some trace of the actual Zola
manner, in "Jennie Gerhardt"; there came from Dreiser the news that he
had never read a line of Zola, and knew nothing about his novels. Not a
complete answer, of course; the influence might have been exerted at
second hand. But through whom? I confess that I am unable to name a
likely medium. The effects of Zola upon Anglo-Saxon fiction have been
almost _nil_; his only avowed disciple, George Moore, has long since
recanted and reformed; he has scarcely rippled the prevailing
romanticism.... Thomas Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent.
There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"
and "Jennie Gerhardt" and again between "Jude the Obscure" and "Sister
Carrie." All four stories deal penetratingly and poignantly with the
essential tragedy of women; all disdain the petty, specious explanations
of popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy beauty.
Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an enchanted discovery of Hardy
in 1896, three years before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy to
push such a fact too hard, and to search for likenesses and parallels
that are really not there. The truth is that Dreiser's points of contact
with Hardy might be easily matched by many striking points of
difference, and that the fundamental ideas in their novels, despite a
common sympathy, are anything but identical. Nor does one apprehend any
ponderable result of Dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for Balzac, which
antedated his discovery of Hardy by two years. He got from both men a
sense of the scope and dignity of the novel; they taught him that a
story might be a good one, and yet considerably more than a story; they
showed him the essential drama of the commonplace. But that they had
more influence in forming his point of view, or even in shaping his
technique, than any one of half a dozen other gods of those young
days--this I scarcely find. In the structure of his n