aret Deland
and F. Hopkinson Smith, and polite bows for Richard Harding Davis and
Robert W. Chambers, but from end to end of his fat tome I am unable to
find the slightest mention of Dreiser.

So much for one group of heroes of the new Dunciad. That it includes
most of the acknowledged heavyweights of the craft--the Babbitts, Mores,
Brownells and so on--goes without saying; as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed
out,[24] these magnificoes are austerely above any consideration of the
literature that is in being. The other group, more courageous and more
honest, proceeds by direct attack; Dreiser is to be disposed of by a
moral _attentat_. Its leaders are two more professors, Stuart P. Sherman
and H. W. Boynton, and in its ranks march the lady critics of the
newspapers, with much shrill, falsetto clamour. Sherman is the only one
of them who shows any intelligible reasoning. Boynton, as always, is a
mere parroter of conventional phrases, and the objections of the ladies
fade imperceptibly into a pious indignation which is indistinguishable
from that of the professional suppressors of vice.

What, then, is Sherman's complaint? In brief, that Dreiser is a liar
when he calls himself a realist; that he is actually a naturalist, and
hence accursed. That "he has evaded the enterprise of representing human
conduct, and confined himself to a representation of animal behaviour."
That he "imposes his own naturalistic philosophy" upon his characters,
making them do what they ought not to do, and think what they ought not
to think. That "he has just two things to tell us about Frank
Cowperwood: that he has a rapacious appetite for money, and a rapacious
appetite for women." That this alleged "theory of animal behaviour" is
not only incorrect but downright immoral, and that "when one-half the
world attempts to assert it, the other half rises in battle."[25]

Only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of all this _brutum fulmen_.
Dreiser, in point of fact, is scarcely more the realist or the
naturalist, in any true sense, than H. G. Wells or the later George
Moore, nor has he ever announced himself in either the one character or
the other--if there be, in fact, any difference between them that any
one save a pigeon-holding pedagogue can discern. He is really something
quite different, and, in his moments, something far more stately. His
aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing
he exposes is not the empty event