to reason he is less than half himself. In _Twelve Men_, on the other
hand, he displays the qualities by virtue of which he attracts and
deserves a serious attention. Rarely generalizing, he portrays a dozen
actual persons he has known, all his honesty brought to the task of
making his account fit the reality exactly, and all his large tolerance
exercised to present the truth without malice or excuses. Here lies the
field of his finest victories, here and in those adjacent tracts of
other books which are nearest this simple method: his representation of
old Gerhardt and of Aaron Berchansky in _The Hand of the Potter_;
numerous sketches of character in that broad pageant _A Hoosier
Holiday_; the tenderly conceived record of Caroline Meeber, wispy and
witless as she often is; the masterly study of Hurstwood's deterioration
in _Sister Carrie_--this last the peak among all Mr. Dreiser's
successes.

Not the incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merciless
verbosity nor his too frequent interposition of crude argument can
destroy the effect which he produces at his best--that of an eminent
spirit brooding over a world which in spite of many condemnations he
deeply, somberly loves. Something peasant-like in his genius may blind
him a little to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his
reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling the plain
truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to
draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or
between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, as much as he
loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls
over which he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a
dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are, he has come
to them from long flights, and has brought back a lifted vision which
enriches his drab narratives. Something spacious, something now lurid