With all his faults Dreiser prefers journalists to philosophers: journalists, according to him, are free of what he calls the “moralistic mush.” After having been through the journalistic mill for some time they cannot be sentimental, and leave to other people the ranting about patriotism, justice, truth and the like. They know the fanatic for what he is, a man ready to make people swallow fairy tales, and to draw personal profits from his hypocrisy. As for the politicians, the journalists see them in their true light, selfish intriguers who gamble with popular ignorance and passions. Even judges stand to him just for what they are, _i.e._, men lucky enough to secure good positions and careful to steer their boat in the wind of public opinion. Once Dreiser called on an editor and while he was waiting he looked about him at the suggestive inscriptions which a mysterious hand had written in unmistakable characters upon the walls. In true American fashion those characters flashed for the members of the staff the decalogue of their profession. EXACTITUDE! EXACTITUDE! EXACTITUDE! WHO? WHAT? WHERE? HOW? THE FACTS! THE COLOR! THE FACTS! But Dreiser fails to tell us that that day he found the essentials of his literary programme. Not imagination, but attention--microscopic attention--is his muse. No realistic writer has been truer to Locke’s aphorism according to which there is nothing in our minds which has not come to them through the senses. He owes to journalistic tactics not only his literary processes, but most of the content of his novels. They are borrowed in a lump from what the French call _faits divers_, _i.e._, from the news columns. His great social novels, “The Financier” and “The Genius,” are dramatized pieces of muck-raking. They leave very little, if anything, to the imagination. They deal with a then recent scandal involving a Philadelphia magnate. Dreiser did not have to invent the story. He went to the spot to gather information and, as a reporter does, he got his man. To build up his Cowperwood, Dreiser did not need to use even one tenth of the imagination which Cuvier showed in reconstructing the dynosaur. Dreiser is not a novelist. He is an historian. Were it only for his sake, the word fiction as applied to a presentation of real life under an assumed name and in an anonymous setting, should be effaced from the English dictionary. Why invent and imagine when reality is teeming with surprise, and why buy the “Arabian Nights” when we have the daily paper and the last news? Dreiser never had any trouble in passing from the composition room to the desk of the novelist. He never went far for subjects. Let others go to the South Seas, to Alaska, to Europe or the East, to find their heroes and heroines. Dreiser sets his camera in the middle of the street. And--by the way--who is the greatest idealist, the fictitious writer who needs castles in Spain for romance, or the unflinching and intuitive observer