lth, touching the record here and there with the
naive hand of a peasant--even though a peasant of genius--wondering how
great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at
the mystery. And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than
they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser
more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all
sure of the prize. As it is, this Trilogy of Desire (never completed in
the third part which was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray
into London) is as considerable an epic as American business has yet to
show.

Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous
as those of the leader of some four-footed herd. In this respect the
novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular _Sister
Carrie_ and _Jennie Gerhardt_, both of them annals of women who fall as
easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand of the conquering
male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the
lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover. No
moralism overlays the biology of these novels. Sex in them is a
free-flowing, expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human
tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually at war with
the rules and taboos which have been devised by mankind to hold its
amative impulses within convenient bounds. To the cosmic philosopher
what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or
that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate
moment?

Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the
forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods
of sex. At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its
vagrant hours. For this his favorite situation is in large part
responsible: that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving
downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and
immediately compliant to his advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the
spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth--an
obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits.
What he most conspicuously leaves out of account is the will and
personality of women, whom he sees, or at least represents, with hardly
any exceptions as mere fools of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no
separate identities till s