Dreiser,
within his limits, belongs to this sabot-shod company of the elect. One
thinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as savant. There is something
of the icy aloofness of the laboratory in him, even when the images he
conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. He is almost as
self-conscious as the Beethoven of the last quartets. In Dreiser the
thing is more intimate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure feeling.
He gets his effects, one might almost say, not by designing them, but by
living them.
But whatever the process, the power of the image evoked is not to be
gainsaid. It is not only brilliant on the surface, but mysterious and
appealing in its depths. One swiftly forgets his intolerable writing,
his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the Athenian
tragedy he instils into his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his
barbaric pirates of finances, his conquered and hamstrung supermen, his
wives who sit and wait. He has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depicting
the spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jennie Gerhardt," is
alone worth all the _dramatis personae_ of popular American fiction
since the days of "Rob o' the Bowl"; Howells could no more have created
him, in his Rodinesque impudence of outline, than he could have created
Tartuffe or Gargantua.
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