causes. A young
man set afire by Huxley might perhaps make a very bad novelist, but it
is a certainty that he could never make a sentimental and superficial
one. There is no need to go further than this single moving adventure to
find the genesis of Dreiser's disdain of the current platitudes, his
sense of life as a complex biological phenomenon, only dimly
comprehended, and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and of
holding to what he finds good. Ah, that he had learned from Huxley, not
only how to inquire, but also how to report! That he had picked up a
talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so damnably
persuasive, so crystal-clear!

But the more one examines Dreiser, either as writer or as theorist of
man, the more his essential isolation becomes apparent. He got a habit
of mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Huxley's habit of writing.
He got a view of woman from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of all
resemblance. He got a certain fine ambition and gusto out of Balzac, but
all that was French and characteristic he left behind. So with Zola,
Howells, Tolstoi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses quickly becomes
rabbinism, almost cabalism. The differences are huge and sprout up in
all directions. Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial
passion in the current efforts to fit him into a German frame, and make
him an agent of Prussian frightfulness in letters. Such childish gabble
one looks for in the New York _Times_, and there is where one actually
finds it. Even the literary monthlies have stood clear of it; it is
important only as material for that treatise upon the patrioteer and his
bawling which remains to be written. The name of the man, true enough,
is obviously Germanic, and he has told us himself, in "A Traveler at
Forty," how he sought out and found the tombs of his ancestors in some
little town of the Rhine country. There are more of these genealogical
revelations in "A Hoosier Holiday," but they show a Rhenish strain that
was already running thin in boyhood. No one, indeed, who reads a
Dreiser novel can fail to see the gap separating the author from these
half-forgotten forbears. He shows even less of German influence than of
English influence.

There is, as a matter of fact, little in modern German fiction that is
intelligibly comparable to "Jennie Gerhardt" and "The Titan," either as
a study of man or as a work of art. The naturalistic movement of the
eighties w