e for self-expression and the
desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity. It is,
in a sense, the story of Cowperwood told over again, but with an
important difference, for Eugene Witla is a much less self-reliant and
powerful fellow than Cowperwood, and so he is unable to muster up the
vast resolution of spirits that he needs to attain happiness. "The
Titan" is the history of a strong man. "The 'Genius'" is the history of
a man essentially weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his route in
life. He goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease
to the end of the chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever between
two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at the close, he sinks into a
whining sort of resignation, the proud courage of Cowperwood is not in
him; he is always a bit despicable in his pathos.

As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well adapted to the dreiserian
pen. But it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of
attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless and
shapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. It is as
if Dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the high
passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit. It is almost as if
he deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. The book is an
endless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to light
up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages of small type; its reading
is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has
forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. Mingled with
all the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. Certain
chapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the
fervid luminosity of "Jennie Gerhardt"; there are character sketches
that deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that the
thing is the work of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lumbers
and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of ponderous imbecility gets into
it. Both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposing
demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advanced
thinking of Greenwich Village. I suspect, indeed, that the _vin rouge_
was in Dreiser's arteries as he concocted it. He was at the intellectual
menopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizingly
toward the goatish days that were no more.

But let it go! A