They, too,
fall into the morass that engulfed "Fecondite," and make sentimental
propaganda.
I go into this matter in detail, not because it is intrinsically of any
moment, but because the effort to depict Dreiser as a secret agent of
the Wilhelmstrasse, told off to inject subtle doses of _Kultur_ into a
naive and pious people, has taken on the proportions of an organized
movement. The same critical imbecility which detects naught save a Tom
cat in Frank Cowperwood can find naught save an abhorrent foreigner in
Cowperwood's creator. The truth is that the trembling patriots of
letters, male and female, are simply at their old game of seeing a man
under the bed. Dreiser, in fact, is densely ignorant of German
literature, as he is of the better part of French literature, and of
much of English literature. He did not even read Hauptmann until after
"Jennie Gerhardt" had been written, and such typical German moderns as
Ludwig Thoma, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel remain as strange
to him as Heliogabalus.
Sec. 2
In his manner, as opposed to his matter, he is more the Teuton, for he
shows all of the racial patience and pertinacity and all of the racial
lack of humour.
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