| | 1 | Author: | Bourne, Randolph | Add | | | Title: | The Art of Theodore Dreiser  | | | | Published: | 2000 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Theodore Dreiser has had the good fortune
to evoke a peculiar quality of pugnacious interest among
the younger American intelligentsia such as has
been the lot of almost nobody else writing today unless
it be Miss Amy Lowell. We do not usually take literature
seriously enough to quarrel over it.
Or else we take it so seriously that we urbanely avoid squabbles.
Certainly there are none of the vendettas that rage in a culture
like that of France. But Mr. Dreiser seems
to have made himself, particularly since the
suppression of "The 'Genius,'" a veritable
issue. Interesting and surprising are the
reactions to him. Edgar Lee Masters makes
him a "soul-enrapt demi-urge, walking the
earth, stalking life"; Harris Merton Lyon saw
in him a "seer of inscrutable mien"; Arthur
Davison Ficke sees him as master of a passing
throng of figures, "labored with immortal illusion, the
terrible and beautiful, cruel and
wonder-laden illusion of life"; Mr. Powys
makes him an epic philosopher of the "life-tide";
H. L. Mencken puts him ahead of Conrad, with
"an agnosticism that has almost
passed beyond curiosity." On the other
hand, an unhappy critic in the "Nation" last
year gave Mr. Dreiser his place for all time
in a neat antithesis between the realism that
was based on a theory of human conduct and
the naturalism that reduced life to a mere
animal behavior. For Dreiser this last special
hell was reserved, and the jungle-like and
simian activities of his characters rather exhaustively outlined.
At the time this antithesis looked silly. With the appearance of
Mr. Dreiser's latest book, "A Hoosier Holiday," it becomes nonsensical.
For that wise and delightful book reveals him as a very human critic
of very common human life, romantically sensual and poetically realistic,
with an artist's vision and a thick, warm feeling for American life. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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