and "haughty in her manner" and so
"loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really offensive"--and down
it goes. He makes an impression on a Mlle. Marcelle in Paris, and she
accompanies him from Monte Carlo to Ventimiglia, and there gives him a
parting kiss and whispers, "_Avril-Fontainebleau_"--and lo, this sweet
one is duly spread upon the minutes. He permits himself to be arrested
by a fair privateer in Piccadilly, and goes with her to one of the dens
of sin that suffragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines her
at length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics and ideals,
and her earnings at her dismal craft--and into the book goes a full
report of the proceedings. He is entertained by an eminent Dutch jurist
in Amsterdam--and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears that the
gentleman is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is probably the
sort of "thin, delicate, well barbered" professor that Ibsen had in mind
when he cast about for a husband for the daughter of General Gabler.

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practises
it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down
of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it
all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by
his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers. A Dreiser novel,
at least of the later canon, cannot be read as other novels are read--on
a winter evening or summer afternoon, between meal and meal, travelling
from New York to Boston. It demands the attention for almost a week, and
uses up the faculties for a month. If, reading "The 'Genius,'" one were
to become engrossed in the fabulous manner described in the publishers'
advertisements, and so find oneself unable to put it down and go to bed
before the end, one would get no sleep for three days and three nights.

Worse, there are no charms of style to mitigate the rigours of these
vast steppes and pampas of narration. Joseph Joubert's saying that
"words should stand out well from the paper" is quite incomprehensible
to Dreiser; he never imitates Flaubert by writing for "_la respiration
et l'oreille_." There is no painful groping for the inevitable word, or
for what Walter Pater called "the gipsy phrase"; the common, even the
commonplace, coin of speech is good enough. On the first page of "Jennie
Gerhardt" one encounters "frank, open countenance," "diffident manner,"
"he