ve we in "The
Financier" and "The Titan"? A conflict, in the ego of Cowperwood,
between aspiration and ambition, between the passion for beauty and the
passion for power. Is either passion animal? To ask the question is to
answer it.

I single out Dr. Sherman, not because his pompous syllogisms have any
plausibility in fact or logic, but simply because he may well stand as
archetype of the booming, indignant corrupter of criteria, the moralist
turned critic. A glance at his paean to Arnold Bennett[27] at once
reveals the true gravamen of his objection to Dreiser. What offends him
is not actually Dreiser's shortcoming as an artist, but Dreiser's
shortcoming as a Christian and an American. In Bennett's volumes of
pseudo-philosophy--_e.g._, "The Plain Man and His Wife" and "The Feast
of St. Friend"--he finds the intellectual victuals that are to his
taste. Here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous conformity and
complacent optimism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty--here, in
brief, we have the philosophy of the English middle classes--and here,
by the same token, we have the sort of guff that the half-educated of
our own country can understand. It is the calm, superior num-skullery
that was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles out of Hannah More. The
offence of Dreiser is that he has disdained this revelation and gone
back to the Greeks. Lo, he reads poetry into "the appetite for
women"--he rejects the Pauline doctrine that all love is below the
diaphragm! He thinks of Ulysses, not as a mere heretic and criminal, but
as a great artist. He sees the life of man, not as a simple theorem in
Calvinism, but as a vast adventure, an enchantment, a mystery. It is no
wonder that respectable school-teachers are against him....

The comstockian attack upon "The 'Genius'" seems to have sprung out of
the same muddled sense of Dreiser's essential hostility to all that is
safe and regular--of the danger in him to that mellowed Methodism which
has become the national ethic. The book, in a way, was a direct
challenge, for though it came to an end upon a note which even a
Methodist might hear as sweet, there were undoubted provocations in
detail. Dreiser, in fact, allowed his scorn to make off with his
taste--and _es ist nichts fuerchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne
Geschmack_. The Comstocks arose to the bait a bit slowly, but none the
less surely. Going through the volume with the terrible industry of a
Sunday-school boy dredgi