And yet, Frank Cowperwood stands alive before our eyes; the whole society of his time can be felt swarming around him,--politics, finance, love, art, the criminal court, the prison. They are alike, not as they would be in Balzac or in Shakespeare, in a great surge of lyricism or pathos, but in a sort of vacuum ordered for them by the indifference of the author. They are painted on the surface of the canvas without any perspective and no play of light to animate them. William Dean Howells knew better than this. * * * * * The second part of the trilogy is called “The Titan,” an ironic title since, at the end of the book, Cowperwood proves a failure, at least for the time being. We find him out of jail and established in Chicago just after the big fire. His energies have not abated and his financial career begins triumphant. We become involved in his minutest rascalities. We learn from him how to bribe the politicians, buy franchises, strangle all competitors, monopolize public utilities to our own selfish advantage. Meanwhile, as an intermission, we are lavishly served with the story of Cowperwood’s adulteries and liaisons, until his boat is shipwrecked on the rock of a municipal election which takes away from him the profits of his grafts. Cowperwood is now a wounded giant but not a dead one. The novelist still foresees for him a brilliant career and like the witches he sends him with his blessing to a new destiny: Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail, Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of individuality. But for him also the eternal equation--the pathos of the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an ultimate balance must be struck.... And this giant himself, rushing on to new struggles and new difficulties in an older land, forever suffering the goad of a restless heart--for him was no ultimate peace, no real understanding, but only hunger and thirst and wonder. Wealth, wealth, wealth! A new grasp of a new great problem and its eventual solution. Anew the old urgent thirst for life, and only its partial quenchment. In Dresden one palace for one woman, in Rome a second for another. In London a third for his beloved Berenice, the lure of beauty ever in his eye. The lives of two women wrecked, a score of victims despoiled.... And he resigned, and yet not--loving, understanding, doubting--caught at last by the drug of a personality which he could not gainsay. Cowperwood certainly breaks the record of human endurance and obduration as a rascal. There must be no break in his career as a buccaneer of finance, and neither must there be any conversion. Tolstoi, Dostoievski or Zola would not have waited so long to restore to Cowperwood at least the semblance of a conscience, were it only to relieve the strain on the reader. Not so with Theodore Dreiser. None ever proved more inexorable.