Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of village habits and prejudices--still he carries wherever he goes the true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity. How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short story _When the Old Century Was New_, an attempt to reconstruct in fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes _A Traveler at Forty_ so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr. Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt terms before he speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and intricate themes--finance and sex and art--which interest him above all others. On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance. The career of Cowperwood in _The Financier_ and _The Titan_, a career notoriously based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise his virtue of patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues generally to convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood's business enterprises. The American financier, after all, has rarely had much subtlety in his make-up. Single-minded, tough-skinned, ruthless, "suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and the like are invented," he shoulders and hurls his bulk through a sea of troubles and carries off his spoils. Such a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. Dreiser understands. He understands the march of desire to its goal. He seems always to have been curious regarding the large operations of finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the intoxication of golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in _The Jew of Malta_, and on his cynical side struck by the mechanism of craft and courage and indomitable impulse which the financier employs. Mr. Dreiser writes, it is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the naïve hand of a peasant--even though a peasant of genius--wondering how great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at the mystery. And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all