he
forces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible.
But in the end he seems genuinely a man--a man of the sort we see about
us in the real world--not a patent and automatic fellow, reacting
docilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities and
contradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and the
shadow--at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and a
civilization, a unique and inexplicable personality. More, he is a man
of the first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the achievement
of Dreiser is most striking, for he succeeds where all fore-runners
failed. It is easy enough to explain how John Smith courted his wife,
and even how William Brown fought and died for his country, but it is
inordinately difficult to give plausibility to the motives, feelings and
processes of mind of a man whose salient character is that they
transcend all ordinary experience. Too often, even when made by the
highest creative and interpretative talent, the effort has resolved
itself into a begging of the question. Shakespeare made Hamlet
comprehensible to the groundlings by diluting that half of him which was
Shakespeare with a half which was a college sophomore. In the same way
he saved Lear by making him, in large part, a tedious and obscene old
donkey--the blood brother of any average ancient of any average English
tap-room. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued by Brutus' knife. George
Bernard Shaw, facing the same difficulty, resolved it by drawing a
composite portrait of two or three London actor-managers and half a
dozen English politicians. But Dreiser makes no such compromise. He
bangs into the difficulties of his problem head on, and if he does not
solve it absolutely, he at least makes an extraordinarily close approach
to a solution. In "The Financier" a certain incredulity still hangs
about Cowperwood; in "The Titan" he suddenly comes unquestionably real.
If you want to get the true measure of this feat, put it beside the
failure of Frank Norris with Curtis Jadwin in "The Pit."...

"The 'Genius,'" which interrupted the "trilogy of desire," marks the
nadir of Dreiser's accomplishment, as "The Titan" marks its apogee. The
plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, at
his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he is
trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of
every man of active mind between the desir