t the feel of New York in "The 'Genius.'" The other is that
the style of the writing in the book reduces the dreiserian manner to
absurdity, and almost to impossibility. The incredibly lazy, involved
and unintelligent description of the trial of Cowperwood I have already
mentioned. We get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a cohesive and
luminous picture, but a dull, photographic representation of the whole
tedious process, beginning with an account of the political obligations
of the judge and district attorney, proceeding to a consideration of the
habits of mind of each of the twelve jurymen, and ending with a summary
of the majority and minority opinions of the court of appeals, and a
discussion of the motives, ideals, traditions, prejudices, sympathies
and chicaneries behind them, each and severally. When Cowperwood goes
into the market, his operations are set forth in their last detail; we
are told how many shares he buys, how much he pays for them, what the
commission is, what his profit comes to. When he comes into chance
contact with a politician, we hear all about that politician, including
his family affairs. When he builds and furnishes a house, the chief
rooms in it are inventoried with such care that not a chair or a rug or
a picture on the wall is overlooked. The endless piling up of such
non-essentials cripples and incommodes the story; its drama is too
copiously swathed in words to achieve a sting; the Dreiser manner
devours and defeats itself.

But none the less the book has compensatory merits. Its character
sketches, for all the cloud of words, are lucid and vigorous. Out of
that enormous complex of crooked politics and crookeder finance,
Cowperwood himself stands out in the round, comprehensible and alive.
And all the others, in their lesser measures, are done almost as
well--Cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in her empty house; Aileen
Butler, his mistress; his doddering and eternally amazed old father; his
old-fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; Stener, the City Treasurer, a
dish-rag in the face of danger; old Edward Malia Butler, that barbarian
in a boiled shirt, with his Homeric hatred and his broken heart.
Particularly old Butler. The years pass and he must be killed and put
away, but not many readers of the book, I take it, will soon forget
him. Dreiser is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men. In
their tragic helplessness they stand as symbols of that unfathomable
cosmic cruelty wh