He has faced, in his day, almost every form of attack
that a serious artist can conceivably encounter, and yet all of them
together have scarcely budged him an inch. He still plods along in the
laborious, cheerless way he first marked out for himself; he is quite as
undaunted by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant abuse; his later
novels are, if anything, more unyieldingly dreiserian than his
earliest. As one who has long sought to entice him in this direction or
that, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what would improve him and
profit him, I may well bear a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony
to his gigantic steadfastness. It is almost as if any change in his
manner, any concession to what is usual and esteemed, any amelioration
of his blind, relentless exercises of _force majeure_, were a physical
impossibility. One feels him at last to be authentically no more than a
helpless instrument (or victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which he
himself is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to the riddle of
life, and a riddle ten times more vexing and accursed.
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