elist, making short shrift of "heart interest,"
conventional "sympathy," and even what ordinarily passes for romance. In
"Sister Carrie," as I have pointed out, there is still a sweet dish for
the sentimentalists; if they don't like the history of Carrie as a work
of art they may still wallow in it as a sad, sad love story. Carrie is
appealing, melting; she moves, like Marguerite Gautier, in an atmosphere
of romantic depression. And Jennie Gerhardt, in this aspect, is merely
Carrie done over--a Carrie more carefully and objectively drawn,
perhaps, but still conceivably to be mistaken for a "sympathetic"
heroine in a best-seller. A lady eating chocolates might jump from
"Laddie" to "Jennie Gerhardt" without knowing that she was jumping ten
thousand miles. The tear jugs are there to cry into. Even in "The
Financier" there is still a hint of familiar things. The first Mrs.
Cowperwood is sorely put upon; old Butler has the markings of an irate
father; Cowperwood himself suffers the orthodox injustice and languishes
in a cell. But no one, I venture, will ever fall into any such mistake
in identity in approaching "The Titan." Not a single appeal to facile
sentiment is in it. It proceeds from beginning to end in a forthright,
uncompromising, confident manner. It is an almost purely objective
account, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death certificate, of a strong
man's contest with incontestable powers without and no less
incontestable powers within. There is nothing of the conventional outlaw
about him; he does not wear a red sash and bellow for liberty; fate
wrings from him no melodramatic defiances. In the midst of the battle he
views it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if lifted above himself
by the sheer aesthetic spectacle. Even in disaster he asks for no
quarter, no generosity, no compassion. Up or down, he keeps his zest for
the game that is being played, and is sufficient unto himself.

Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago days, described
romantically, would be indistinguishable from the wicked earls and
seven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The Duchess. But
described realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth of
minute and apparently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles up so
amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike and
engrossing. He fits into no _a priori_ theory of conduct or scheme of
rewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; t