arns little save that he is a Christian Scientist and a fine figure of
a man. There must have been much talk during those two weeks of
careening along the high-road, and Booth must have borne some part in
it, but what he said is very meagrely reported, and so he is still
somewhat vague at the end--a personality sensed but scarcely
apprehended.

However, it is Dreiser himself who is the chief character of the story,
and who stands out from it most brilliantly. One sees in the man all the
special marks of the novelist: his capacity for photographic and
relentless observation, his insatiable curiosity, his keen zest in life
as a spectacle, his comprehension of and sympathy for the poor striving
of humble folks, his endless mulling of insoluble problems, his
recurrent Philistinism, his impatience of restraints, his fascinated
suspicion of messiahs, his passion for physical beauty, his relish for
the gaudy drama of big cities; his incurable Americanism. The panorama
that he enrols runs the whole scale of the colours; it is a series of
extraordinarily vivid pictures. The sombre gloom of the Pennsylvania
hills, with Wilkes-Barre lying among them like a gem; the procession of
little country towns, sleepy and a bit hoggish; the flash of Buffalo,
Cleveland, Indianapolis; the gargantuan coal-pockets and ore-docks along
the Erie shore; the tinsel summer resorts; the lush Indiana farmlands,
with their stodgy, bovine people--all of these things are sketched in
simply, and yet almost magnificently. I know, indeed, of no book which
better describes the American hinterland. Here we have no idle spying by
a stranger, but a full-length representation by one who knows the thing
he describes intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost every mile
of the road travelled has been Dreiser's own road in life. He knew those
unkempt Indiana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the Indiana woods; he
came to Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo as a young man; all the roots of his
existence are out there. And so he does his chronicle _con amore_, with
many a sentimental dredging up of old memories, old hopes and old
dreams.

Save for passages in "The Titan," "A Hoosier Holiday" marks the high
tide of Dreiser's writing--that is, as sheer writing. His old faults
are in it, and plentifully. There are empty, brackish phrases enough,
God knows--"high noon" among them. But for all that, there is an
undeniable glow in it; it shows, in more than one place, an approac