cannot be compared with _Sister Carrie_ for insight or accuracy or
charm. His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination
toward the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero and
half picaro. Witla remains mediocre enough in all but his sexual
unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving force more or less
like those forces which impel Cowperwood. The will to wealth, the will
to love, the will to art--Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind
energies with no goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he
tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their
earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit. Particularly is
this true of his representation of the careers of artists. Carrie
becomes a noted actress in a few short weeks; Witla almost as rapidly
becomes a noted illustrator; other minor characters here and there in
the novels are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it.
Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing analysis of the
mysterious behavior of true genius. Mr. Dreiser's artists are hardly
persons at all; they are creatures driven, and the wonder lies primarily
in the impelling energy. The cosmic philosopher in him sees the
beginning and the end of the artistic process better than the novelist
in him sees its methods. And the peasant in him, though it knows the
world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investigated that
world at first hand, still leads him to report it in terms often quaint,
melodramatic, invincibly rural. Witness the hundreds of times he calls
things "artistic."

Two of his latest books indicate the range of his gifts and his
excellences. In _Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub_, which he calls A Book of the
Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, he undertook to expound his
general philosophy and produced the most negligible of all his works. He
has no faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he begins