What would Howells have said, if he had read the chapter on “The Virgin and the Dynamo” in the book of Henry Adams’ education? He regarded love as a short cut to marriage and marriage as a penitentiary for life. How disillusioned a moralist the Puritan novelist must have been when he resorted to a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument in favor of matrimony, like the following: The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a strain of wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without lesion; and sometimes (Howells has not counted how often) the strength that knits society together might appear to the eye of the faltering faith the curse of those immediately bound by it. Two people by no means reckless of each other’s rights and feelings, but even tender of them for the most part, may tear each other’s heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though if they were any other two they would not speak or look at each other again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a curious spectacle, _and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of the divinity of the institution_. It certainly does, and also of the monstrous paradoxes to which Puritan rigorism lead Howells. The wedding ring, the hoop skirt and the hearse,--such was his romantic outlook of life. William Dean Howells was anything but a Greek. CHAPTER IV _Theodore Dreiser as a Bio-Chemist_ Few books have been subjected to more discussion and criticism than those of Theodore Dreiser. As a novelist, a short-story writer, an essayist and a playwright, he never has coaxed his readers. Far from this; he has even chosen to tire them out. He impersonates a radical and an almost trivial realism. Critics in sympathy with his writings ask us to place him in his own time, in order that we may understand him. He is the historian of a disillusioned America, of an America which sits anxious among its heaps of riches, an America which has lost the romantic faith in itself. It is a country of ever-increasing material comfort and luxury, of quick gains and of tremendous affairs, a land where the dollar is as rapidly lost as earned. Philanthropy abroad and merciless competition at home, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” sensational criminal trials, scandals and panics,--in brief, the most stupendous utilitarian civilization that the world has ever seen, a Babel of towers scraping the sky to make it rain more money: such is America in Theodore Dreiser’s massive and conscientious “The Financier,” “The Titan,” “An American Tragedy.” However, it would be a grave mistake from the start if we catalogued him among the social novelists, in the same class with Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair or Jack London. He never tried to reform society by his writings.