It is not only his feeling for these themes of crude power and sex and the American common life that makes Dreiser interesting. His emphases are those of a new America which is latently expressive and which must develop its art before we shall really have become articulate. For Dreiser is a true hyphenate, a product of that conglomerate Americanism that springs from other roots than the English tradition. Do we realize how rare it is to find a talent that is thoroughly American and wholly un-English? Culturally we have somehow suppressed the hyphenate. Only recently has he forced his way through the unofficial literary censorship. The vers-librists teem with him, but Dreiser is almost the first to achieve a largeness of utterance. His outlook, it is true, flouts the American canons of optimism and redemption, but these were never anything but conventions. There stirs in Dreiser’s books a new American quality. It is not at all German. It is an authentic attempt to make something artistic out of the chaotic materials that lie around us in American life. Dreiser interests because we can watch him grope and feel his clumsiness. He has the artist’s vision without the sureness of the artist’s technique. That is one of the tragedies of America. But his faults are those of his material and of uncouth bulk, and not of shoddiness. He expresses an America that is in process of forming. The interest he evokes is part of the eager interest we feel in that growth. THE USES OF INFALLIBILITY Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote, and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, _Apologia Pro Vita Sua_, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times. Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt.