Even in disaster he asks for no
quarter, no generosity, no compassion. Up or down, he keeps his zest for
the game that is being played, and is sufficient unto himself.
Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago days, described
romantically, would be indistinguishable from the wicked earls and
seven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The Duchess. But
described realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth of
minute and apparently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles up so
amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike and
engrossing. He fits into no _a priori_ theory of conduct or scheme of
rewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; the
forces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible.
But in the end he seems genuinely a man--a man of the sort we see about
us in the real world--not a patent and automatic fellow, reacting
docilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities and
contradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and the
shadow--at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and a
civilization, a unique and inexplicable personality.
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