There is vastly more intuition in him than
intellectualism; his talent is essentially feminine, as Conrad's is
masculine; his ideas always seem to be deduced from his feelings. The
view of life that got into "Sister Carrie," his first book, was not the
product of a conscious thinking out of Carrie's problems. It simply got
itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its
coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. The
thing began as a vision, not as a syllogism. Here the name of Franz
Schubert inevitably comes up. Schubert was an ignoramus, even in music;
he knew less about polyphony, which is the mother of harmony, which is
the mother of music, than the average conservatory professor. But
nevertheless he had such a vast instinctive sensitiveness to musical
values, such a profound and accurate feeling for beauty in tone, that he
not only arrived at the truth in tonal relations, but even went beyond
what, in his day, was known to be the truth, and so led an advance.
Likewise, Giorgione da Castelfranco and Masaccio come to mind: painters
of the first rank, but untutored, unsophisticated, uncouth.
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