THE GENIUS OF MR. THEODORE DREISER

And Some Other Geniuses

Henry Brinsley

THE work of Mr. Dreiser has of recent years more and more challenged the attention and confused the judgment of the critical. It has been extravagantly praised and it has been ruthlessly condemned. Before "playing safe" and contenting one's self with the conclusion that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between these two extremes, it may be well to analyze, even if cursorily, some of Mr. Dreiser's merits and defects as an expounder of the human drama in terms of uncompromising realism. Two characteristics of his novels are at once salient— their megatherian size and their complete frankness on the score of sexual pathology. Both these characteristics militate against a widespread popularity.

The general public which reads simply for sporadic amusement is impatient at the mere size of a novel like "The 'Genius'," which, if printed in the usual "form" of most novels, would run to a book of over a thousand pages. Your avid critic may rejoice at so big and so serious a bone to pick, but your average reader gives a wistful sniff and turns to something more manageable. Here the average reader frequently makes a mistake and misses many good things. Mere size is often an important aesthetic factor in a work of art: often by no other means can an effect of splendor, of dignity, of sheer importance be so impressively secured, whether the work of art be a cathedral, a railway station, a biography, or a novel. It is only a magnified triviality or a prolonged boredom that in usurping the cappa magna of importance becomes grotesque. Even the life of the most socially unimportant human being may be treated on an epic scale, for with any life as a starting-point and a focus a philosopher or a genius can expound all of our common humanity in all its dignity. If you joyfully grant the author of "Esther Waters" as big a canvas as he wishes, you must, however reluctantly—before the fact—concede the same privilege to the author of "The 'Genius'." After the fact you may determine what he has done with it.

I WISH the war were not on at present, for I should like to discuss without suspicion of militancy a phase of the German temperament which I feel that Mr. Dreiser markedly shares —its frequent love of bulk apparently for its own sake and its insensitiveness to satiety, or, perhaps, its gallant patience under it. To one of another race it seems incredible that a man can drink a gallon of beer with the same discriminating relish that will appreciatively carry him through a litre. (I could discuss "Tristan and Isolde" on these terms but it would be like shaking a hornet's nest.) However, all that I am driving at is that the effect of size in Mr. Dreiser's work is more Teutonic than tonic; it has not, aesthetically, quite the justificatory value that one wishes it had. Which is perhaps enough on this head.

As for the frankness of his sex-pathology, it is too late in the day to quarrel with this. Whether you deplore the fact or not, the English novel has broken its fetters, and the serious artist can now grapple with life as every honest grown human being knows it actually exists. Who should be permitted to read what, is a problem that the lay critic may well evade, confining his function rigidly to a weighing of aesthetic values. On this particular point Mr. Henry James has, as usual, hit the critical bull's-eye more centrally than any other. Speaking of one of Signor d'Annunzio's characters, Andrea Sperelli, he remarks that he " becomes in the course of a few weeks in Rome the lover of some twenty or thirty women of fashion—the number scarce matters; but to make this possible, his connection with each has but to last a day or two and the effect of that in its order is to reduce to nothing, by vulgarity, by frank grotesqueness of association, the romantic capacity in him on which his chronicler's whole appeal to us is based. The association rising before us more nearly than any other is that of the manners observable! in the most mimetic department of any great menagerie." Now with but few verbal changes this inimitably worded and exquisitely acute observation could be accurately applied to the hero of Mr. Dreiser's "Titan," and, with more modification, to Eugene Witla, the "Genius." When the relations between your characters are, in another of Mr. James's wonderful phrases, "suggestive of mere zoological sociability," the life you are depicting may be as "real" as you please, but it runs the risk of failing to achieve the "significance" that alone can justify a work of art.

Herein, I think, lies the failure of Mr. Dreiser's art: its lack of significance. "The 'Genius'," the study of a painter who achieves a brilliant success in the world of art and of business, and whose character and physique are constantly weakened by his passionate love for a youthful type of feminine beauty, gives us a picture that is scrupulously detailed and based uncompromisingly upon reality, that is characteristic, panoramic, vivid—anything you like, but its significance, from the point of view of ethics, philosophy, or art, is about that of alertly pedestrian journalism. Mr. Dreiser's books impress me less as novels than as immensely documented "cases." One reads them with intense interest, admiring the patience with which the myriad details are assembled and the orderliness with which they are marshalled. Nihil humanum mihi alienum est is an admirable motto for an artist, as far as it goes: certainly nothing that concerns humanity is foreign to Mr. Dreiser's purpose. But—when everything is given with equal emphasis the effect in the long run is one of over-orchestration, and one finally becomes aware of the deadly fact that mere dynamic force is not "significance" in any real sense of the term.

OF beauty, distinction, charm of style, Mr. Dreiser is, I fancy, impatient. He has a big job to perform, a big canvas to fill, and, with a richly equipped palette, his rapid vision and indomitable energy hurry past the trivial exigencies of brush work. No one this side of a genius would permit himself such a blurred stroke, so sloppily invertebrate a sentence as this (I have opened the book quite at random): "There was a spacious areaway between two wings of cream-colored pressed brick leading back to an entrance way which was protected by a handsome wrought-iron door, on either side of which was placed an electric lamp support of handsome design, holding lovely cream-colored globes, shedding a soft lustre." And finally the most curious effect of Mr. Dreiser's method is that you cannot see the wood for the trees: the characters, despite the endless data you have concerning them, rarely emerge into definite personalities. The chief actor perhaps does somewhat, because of being so persistently in focus, but after a week's absence from the book it is difficult to remember, for example, wherein Angela, Witla's wife, is essentially different from any one of his mistresses, and it is difficult to see how, cutting through the wealth of highly specific details concerning them, any one of the minor personages can be ranked as much more than a purely conventional "type" instead of a crisply unique individual. In supreme art the characters are, of course, at the same time both "types" and individuals. Well, Mr. Dreiser, is in his forceful way, a genius,—I can't get away from that even if I wanted to; but he is a paradoxical genius in that he lacks the capacity for "taking infinite pains." Whether or not he is yet an artist, in the best sense of the word, is quite another matter.

Books Received

THE "GENIUS" By Theodore Dreiser

John Lane Company, New York $1.50

THE LITTLE ILIAD By Maurice Hewlett

J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia $1.35

THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT By H. G. Wells

The Macmillan Company, New York $1.50

EMMA McCHIESNEY & CO. By Edna Ferber

Frederick A. Stokes, New York $1.00

THE GOLDEN CALF .. By Hugh Walpole

George H. Doran Company, New York $1.25

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MR. MAURICE HEWLETT, whatever else he may be, is an artist—to his finger-tips. Just as genius carried to a certain pitch may create an illusion of artistry, so art carried to Mr. Hewlett's lengths may create an illusion of genius. Certainly he has developed the craft of literary filigree with a more astonishingly delicate mastery than has any of his contemporaries. In "The Little Iliad" he has taken the theme of Homer and casting it in modern mould has changed it into an exquisite comedy,—as if Cellini should take a splendid figure of Polyclitus' and model from it a jewelled drinking cup. Helen is the wife of a fat, competent Austrian baron, Hector and Paris and the rest are the sons and friendly adherents of Sir Roderick Malleson, a Priamesque Scottish chieftain. The whole thing is there in petto, not at all heroic but immoderately charming. If the effect, as is so often the case with Mr. Hewlett, is one of high artificiality, the artifice is none the less delightfully high-bred. And those who are impatient of any form of literary artifice, as verging on "insincerity," should remember that Mr. Hewlett, with all his deft elaboration of style, is a very warmly discerning student of the human animal, and gets him surprisingly "right" most of the time. You may strip his people of the rhetorical furtherances with which he clothes them, and find real muscle beneath.

MR. WELLS, in "The Research Magnificent" gives us jottings from the diary of a high-minded young Englishman and his own comments thereon. His hero's "research" is a seeking after the "aristocratic life" in its most exact sense. The sdfety of the future, he is convinced, rests with those who have the best training and the finest ideals: they alone, the true aristocrats, should rule, they only can effect that higher socialism that will rationalize and refine our modem life. The hero tries to live this life, but instead of actually living it, most of his time is consumed in a definition of what, after all, constitutes aristocracy. Mr. Wells, of course, bristles with stimulating discussion that, constructively, gets us nowhere at all. As usual he lavishly spreads a banquet that is really a Barmecide feast. Curiously enough, many of his readers come away convinced that they have had a square meal, there has been such a rattling of dishes,— a high tribute to his art and fascinating speciousness. At this particular feast his gestures are rather more splendid than ever and I am correspondingly pleased. But I am nevertheless patiently waiting for the real bun (like "Bealby") that he occasionally tosses us between banquets.

TO any one who cares to study a work of fiction that is the exact literary equivalent of Miss May Irwin's acting, I suggest "Emma McChesney and Co." by Miss Ferber. The perhaps trivial objection has been raised that Miss Ferber is keeping Mrs. McChesney alive by means of hypodermic injections of ink. The curious may also care to read "The Golden Calf" by Mr. Walpole, a study in child-psychology, where he has made a conscientious and somewhat heavy-handed grasp at a delicately imaginative theme.