as launched by men whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it is
in that field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent. "German
naturalism," says George Madison Priest, quoting Gotthold Klee's
"Grunzuege der deutschen Literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only in
the drama."[18] True enough, it has also produced occasional novels, and
some of them are respectable. Gustav Frenssen's "Joern Uhl" is a
specimen: it has been done into English. Another is Clara Viebig's "Das
taegliche Brot," which Ludwig Lewisohn compares to George Moore's "Esther
Waters." Yet another is Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks." But it would be
absurd to cite these works as evidences of a national quality, and
doubly absurd to think of them as inspiring such books as "Jennie
Gerhardt" and "The Titan," which excel them in everything save
workmanship. The case of Mann reveals a tendency that is visible in
nearly all of his contemporaries. Starting out as an agnostic realist
not unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old Wives' Tale," he has gradually
taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later
books, "Koenigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon a
note of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraeulein Viebig
has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wacht
am Rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an
eloquent hymn to patriotism--a theme which almost always baffles
novelists. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by trade, and carries over
into the novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of
these German naturalists--and they are the only German novelists worth
considering--share the weakness of Zola, their _Stammvater_. They, too,
fall into the morass that engulfed "Fecondite," and make sentimental
propaganda.

I go into this matter in detail, not because it is intrinsically of any
moment, but because the effort to depict Dreiser as a secret agent of
the Wilhelmstrasse, told off to inject subtle doses of _Kultur_ into a
naive and pious people, has taken on the proportions of an organized
movement. The same critical imbecility which detects naught save a Tom
cat in Frank Cowperwood can find naught save an abhorrent foreigner in
Cowperwood's creator. The truth is that the trembling patriots of
letters, male and female, are simply at their old game of seeing a man
under the bed. Dreiser, in fact, is densely ignorant of German
literature, as he i