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 some lover shapes them. To something like this
simplicity the rôle of women in love is reduced by those Boccaccian
fabulists who adorn the village taproom and the corner grocery.

Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider _The 'Genius'_, a massive, muddy,
powerful narrative, his greatest novel, though as a matter of fact it