ovels, and in their
manner of approach to life no less, they call up the work of Dostoyevsky
and Turgenev far more than the work of either of these men--but of all
the Russians save Tolstoi (as of Flaubert) Dreiser himself tells us that
he was ignorant until ten years after "Sister Carrie." In his days of
preparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and so disorderly that
antagonistic influences must have well-nigh neutralized one another, and
so left the curious youngster to work out his own method and his own
philosophy. Stevenson went down with Balzac, Poe with Hardy, Dumas
_fils_ with Tolstoi. There were even months of delight in Sienkiewicz,
Lew Wallace and E. P. Roe! The whole repertory of the pedagogues had
been fought through in school and college: Dickens, Thackeray,
Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Kingsley, Scott. Only Irving and
Hawthorne seem to have made deep impressions. "I used to lie under a
tree," says Dreiser, "and read 'Twice Told Tales' by the hour. I thought
'The Alhambra' was a perfect creation, and I still have a lingering
affection for it." Add Bret Harte, George Ebers, William Dean Howells,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and you have a literary stew indeed!... But for
all its bubbling I see a far more potent influence in the chance
discovery of Spencer and Huxley at twenty-three--the year of choosing!
Who, indeed, will ever measure the effect of those two giants upon the
young men of that era--Spencer with his inordinate meticulousness, his
relentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syllogisms, and Huxley
with his devastating agnosticism, his insatiable questionings of the old
axioms, above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would appear, has
been condemned to the scientific hulks, along with bores innumerable and
unspeakable; one looks in vain for any appreciation of him in treatises
on beautiful letters.[17] And yet the man was a superb artist in works,
a master-writer even more than a master-biologist, one of the few truly
great stylists that England has produced since the time of Anne. One can
easily imagine the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds upon
a youth groping about for self-understanding and self-expression. They
swept him clean, he tells us, of the lingering faith of his boyhood--a
mediaeval, Rhenish Catholicism;--more, they filled him with a new and
eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life that lay about him, a
desire to seek out its hidden workings and underlying