Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher,
reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its
ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. And that
other English novelist who springs from the servants' hall--let us not
be surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like a bounder.
The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the transition stage
between Christian Endeavour and civilization, between Warsaw, Indiana
and the Socratic grove, between being a good American and being a free
man, and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a moral
sentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant revolt. "The 'Genius,'" on
the one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a Warning to the Young;
its motto might be _Scheut die Dirnen_! And on the other hand, it is
full of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by imagining
the author as heroically determined to prove that he is a plain-spoken
fellow and his own man, let the chips fall where they may. So, in spots,
in "The Financier" and "The Titan," both of them far better books.
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