In "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt" no such
brake upon exuberance is visible; both books are crammed with details
that serve no purpose, and are as flat as ditch-water. Even in the two
volumes of personal record, "A Traveler at Forty" and "A Hoosier
Holiday," there is the same furious accumulation of trivialities.
Consider the former. It is without structure, without selection, without
reticence. One arises from it as from a great babbling, half drunken. On
the one hand the author fills a long and gloomy chapter with the story
of the Borgias, apparently under the impression that it is news, and on
the other hand he enters into intimate and inconsequential confidences
about all the persons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocent
nor the obscure. The children of his English host at Bridgely Level
strike him as fantastic little creatures, even as a bit uncanny--and he
duly sets it down. He meets an Englishman on a French train who pleases
him much, and the two become good friends and see Rome together, but the
fellow's wife is "obstreperous" and "haughty in her manner" and so
"loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really offensive"--and down
it goes.
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