ved. But "The
'Genius'"? Ay, in "The 'Genius'" the pendulum swings back again! It is
flaccid, elephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sophomoric,
ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One pities the jurisconsult who is
condemned, by Comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. In it
there is a sort of humourless _reductio ad absurdum_, not only of the
Dreiser manner, but even of certain salient tenets of the Dreiser
philosophy. At its best it has a moral flavour. At its worst it is
almost maudlin....

The most successful of the Dreiser novels, judged by sales, is "Sister
Carrie," and the causes thereof are not far to seek. On the one hand,
its suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that was converted into
a public celebrity when it was republished in 1907, and on the other
hand it shares with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of having a
young and appealing woman for its chief figure. The sentimentalists thus
have a heroine to cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole;
Carrie becomes a sort of Pollyanna. More, it is, at bottom, a tale of
love--the one theme of permanent interest to the average American
novel-reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling romances. True
enough, it is vastly more than this--there is in it, for example, the
astounding portrait of Hurstwood--, but it seems to me plain that its
relative popularity is by no means a test of its relative merit, and
that the causes of that popularity must be sought in other directions.
Its defect, as a work of art, is a defect of structure. Like Norris'
"McTeague" it has a broken back. In the midst of the story of Carrie,
Dreiser pauses to tell the story of Hurstwood--a memorably vivid and
tragic story, to be sure, but still one that, considering artistic form
and organization, does damage to the main business of the book. Its
outstanding merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness and
fervour, the spirit of youth that is in it. One feels that it was
written, not by a novelist conscious of his tricks, but by a novice
carried away by his own flaming eagerness, his own high sense of the
interest of what he was doing. In this aspect, it is perhaps more
typically Dreiserian than any of its successors. And maybe we may seek
here for a good deal of its popular appeal, for there is a contagion in
naivete as in enthusiasm, and the simple novel-reader may recognize the
kinship of a simple mind in the novelist.

But it is in