And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious as his motive power.
To fit him into the unrolling chart of American, or even of English
fiction is extremely difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller (whose
"With the Procession" and "The Cliff-Dwellers" are still remembered by
Huneker, but by whom else?[16]), he seems to have had no fore-runner
among us, and for all the discussion of him that goes on, he has few
avowed disciples, and none of them gets within miles of him. One catches
echoes of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Cather, in Mary S. Watts, in
David Graham Phillips, in Sherwood Anderson and in Joseph Medill
Patterson, but, after all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert
Herrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imitators further
removed to sheer burlesque. All the latter-day American novelists of
consideration are vastly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy,
as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies the measure of
their difference. What they lack, great and small, is the gesture of
pity, the note of awe, the profound sense of wonder--in a phrase, that
"soberness of mind" which William Lyon Phelps sees as the hallmark of
Conrad and Hardy, and which even the most stupid cannot escape in
Dreiser.
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