A lady eating chocolates might jump from
"Laddie" to "Jennie Gerhardt" without knowing that she was jumping ten
thousand miles. The tear jugs are there to cry into. Even in "The
Financier" there is still a hint of familiar things. The first Mrs.
Cowperwood is sorely put upon; old Butler has the markings of an irate
father; Cowperwood himself suffers the orthodox injustice and languishes
in a cell. But no one, I venture, will ever fall into any such mistake
in identity in approaching "The Titan." Not a single appeal to facile
sentiment is in it. It proceeds from beginning to end in a forthright,
uncompromising, confident manner. It is an almost purely objective
account, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death certificate, of a strong
man's contest with incontestable powers without and no less
incontestable powers within. There is nothing of the conventional outlaw
about him; he does not wear a red sash and bellow for liberty; fate
wrings from him no melodramatic defiances. In the midst of the battle he
views it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if lifted above himself
by the sheer aesthetic spectacle.
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