Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods of sex.  At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its vagrant hours.  For this his favorite situation is in large part responsible:  that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and immediately compliant to his advances.  Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth—­an obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits.  What he most conspicuously leaves out of account is the will and personality of women, whom he sees, or at least represents, with hardly any exceptions as mere fools of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no separate identities till some lover shapes them.  To something like this simplicity the role of women in love is reduced by those Boccaccian fabulists who adorn the village taproom and the corner grocery.

Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider The ’Genius’, a massive, muddy, powerful narrative, his greatest novel, though as a matter of fact it cannot be compared with Sister Carrie for insight or accuracy or charm.  His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination toward the life of art, through which his ‘Genius’ moves, half hero and half picaro.  Witla remains mediocre enough in all but his sexual unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving force more or less like those forces which impel Cowperwood.  The will to wealth, the will to love, the will to art—­Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind energies with no goal except self-realization.  So conceiving them he tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit.  Particularly is this true of his representation of the careers of artists.  Carrie becomes a noted actress in a few short weeks; Witla almost as rapidly becomes a noted illustrator; other minor characters here and there in the novels are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it.  Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing analysis of the mysterious behavior of true genius.  Mr. Dreiser’s artists are hardly persons at all; they are creatures driven, and the wonder lies primarily in the impelling energy.  The cosmic philosopher in him sees the beginning and the end of the artistic process better than the novelist in him sees its methods.  And the peasant in him, though it knows the world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investigated that world at first hand, still leads him to report it in terms often quaint, melodramatic, invincibly rural.  Witness the hundreds of times he calls things “artistic.”