There
is an almost moral frenzy to expose and riddle what passes for morality
among the stupid. The isolation of irony is never reached; the man is
still evangelical; his ideas are still novelties to him; he is as
solemnly absurd in some of his floutings of the Code Americain as he is
in his respect for Bouguereau, or in his flirtings with the New Thought,
or in his naive belief in the importance of novel-writing. Somewhere or
other I have called all this the Greenwich Village complex. It is not
genuine artists, serving beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in
those cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob of half-educated
yokels and cockneys to whom the very idea of art is still novel, and
intoxicating--and more than a little bawdy.
Not that Dreiser actually belongs to this ragamuffin company. Far from
it, indeed. There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive
artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way,
held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made
uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own
comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of art of unquestionable
beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant
and illuminating.
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