ven the most stupid cannot escape in
Dreiser. The normal American novel, even in its most serious forms,
takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. It runs
monotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness and
hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the not
worth knowing. What it cannot explain away with ready formulae, as in
the later Winston Churchill, it snickers over as scarcely worth
explaining at all, as in the later Howells. Such a brave and tragic
book as "Ethan Frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even with
Mrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not much market for that sort of
thing. In the arts, as in the concerns of everyday, the American seeks
escape from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved. A comfortable
phrase is what he craves beyond all things--and comfortable phrases are
surely not to be sought in Dreiser's stock.

I have heard argument that he is a follower of Frank Norris, and two or
three facts lend it a specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in
1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first to
see the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, as
literary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co., against its suppression after
it was in type. But this theory runs aground upon two circumstances, the
first being that Dreiser did not actually read "McTeague," nor, indeed,
grow aware of Norris, until after "Sister Carrie" was completed, and the
other being that his development, once he began to write other books,
was along paths far distant from those pursued by Norris himself.
Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger man than Norris from the start; it is to
the latter's unending honour that he recognized the fact instanter, and
yet did all he could to help his rival. It is imaginable, of course,
that Norris, living fifteen years longer, might have overtaken Dreiser,
and even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing that way in
"Vandover and the Brute" (not printed until 1914). But it swings sharply
around in "The Epic of the Wheat." In the second volume of that
incomplete trilogy, "The Pit," there is an obvious concession to the
popular taste in romance; the thing is so frankly written down, indeed,
that a play has been made of it, and Broadway has applauded it. And in
"The Octopus," despite some excellent writing, there is a descent to a
mysticism so fantastic and preposterous that it quickly passes beyond
s