novelist capable of "Jennie Gerhardt" has rights,
privileges, prerogatives. He may, if he will, go on a spiritual drunk
now and then, and empty the stale bilges of his soul. Thackeray, having
finished "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis," bathed himself in the sheep's
milk of "The Newcomes," and after "The Virginians" he did "The
Adventures of Philip." Zola, with "Germinal," "La Debacle" and "La
Terre" behind him, recreated himself horribly with "Fecondite." Tolstoi,
after "Anna Karenina," wrote "What Is Art?" Ibsen, after "Et Dukkehjem"
and "Gengangere," wrote "Vildanden." The good God himself, after all
the magnificence of Kings and Chronicles, turned Dr. Frank Crane and so
botched his Writ with Proverbs.... A weakness that we must allow for.
Whenever Dreiser, abandoning his fundamental scepticism, yields to the
irrepressible human (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, to
moralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. Observe "The 'Genius,'" and
parts of "A Hoosier Holiday" and of "A Traveler at Forty," and of "Plays
of the Natural and the Supernatural." But in this very absurdity, it
seems to me, there is a subtle proof that his fundamental scepticism is
sound....

I mention the "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural." They are
ingenious and sometimes extremely effective, but their significance is
not great. The two that are "of the natural" are "The Girl in the
Coffin" and "Old Ragpicker," the first a laborious evocation of the
gruesome, too long by half, and the other an experiment in photographic
realism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. All five plays
"of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as it
were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the
background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the
operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The
technical trick is well managed. It would be easy for such
four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least two
cases, to wit, in "The Blue Sphere" and "In the Dark," they go off with
an air. Superficially, these plays "of the supernatural" seem to show an
abandonment to the wheezy, black bombazine mysticism which crops up
toward the end of "The 'Genius.'" But that mysticism, at bottom, is no
more than the dreiserian scepticism made visible. "For myself," says
Dreiser somewhere, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what
love is, what hope is." And in another plac