"I used to lie under a
tree," says Dreiser, "and read 'Twice Told Tales' by the hour. I thought
'The Alhambra' was a perfect creation, and I still have a lingering
affection for it." Add Bret Harte, George Ebers, William Dean Howells,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and you have a literary stew indeed!... But for
all its bubbling I see a far more potent influence in the chance
discovery of Spencer and Huxley at twenty-three--the year of choosing!
Who, indeed, will ever measure the effect of those two giants upon the
young men of that era--Spencer with his inordinate meticulousness, his
relentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syllogisms, and Huxley
with his devastating agnosticism, his insatiable questionings of the old
axioms, above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would appear, has
been condemned to the scientific hulks, along with bores innumerable and
unspeakable; one looks in vain for any appreciation of him in treatises
on beautiful letters.[17] And yet the man was a superb artist in works,
a master-writer even more than a master-biologist, one of the few truly
great stylists that England has produced since the time of Anne.
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