were dissenting in their various dialects from the reticences and the
romances then current. Personally Mr. Dreiser displays, almost alone
among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a
better native term we have to call the peasant type--the type to which
Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to.

Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of
novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of
village habits and prejudices--still he carries wherever he goes the
true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald
frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity.
How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short
story _When the Old Century Was New_, an attempt to reconstruct in
fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some
deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another
age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes _A Traveler at
Forty_ so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true
Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a
frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr.
Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier
American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is
undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor
essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt terms before he
speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and
intricate themes--finance and sex and art--which interest him above all
others.

On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance. The career of
Cowperwood in _The Financier_ and _The Titan_, a career notoriously
based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise