he way the man has held his narrow and perilous ground, disdaining
all compromise, unmoved by the cheap success that lies so inviting
around the corner. He has faced, in his day, almost every form of attack
that a serious artist can conceivably encounter, and yet all of them
together have scarcely budged him an inch. He still plods along in the
laborious, cheerless way he first marked out for himself; he is quite as
undaunted by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant abuse; his later
novels are, if anything, more unyieldingly dreiserian than his
earliest. As one who has long sought to entice him in this direction or
that, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what would improve him and
profit him, I may well bear a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony
to his gigantic steadfastness. It is almost as if any change in his
manner, any concession to what is usual and esteemed, any amelioration
of his blind, relentless exercises of _force majeure_, were a physical
impossibility. One feels him at last to be authentically no more than a
helpless instrument (or victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which he
himself is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to the riddle of
life, and a riddle ten times more vexing and accursed.

And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious as his motive power.
To fit him into the unrolling chart of American, or even of English
fiction is extremely difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller (whose
"With the Procession" and "The Cliff-Dwellers" are still remembered by
Huneker, but by whom else?[16]), he seems to have had no fore-runner
among us, and for all the discussion of him that goes on, he has few
avowed disciples, and none of them gets within miles of him. One catches
echoes of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Cather, in Mary S. Watts, in
David Graham Phillips, in Sherwood Anderson and in Joseph Medill
Patterson, but, after all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert
Herrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imitators further
removed to sheer burlesque. All the latter-day American novelists of
consideration are vastly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy,
as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies the measure of
their difference. What they lack, great and small, is the gesture of
pity, the note of awe, the profound sense of wonder--in a phrase, that
"soberness of mind" which William Lyon Phelps sees as the hallmark of
Conrad and Hardy, and which e