great hulking, ungainly negro, a positively animal man, with a red flannel shawl around his ears, and his arms and legs looking “as though he might have on two or three pairs of trousers and as many vests.” What a debauch of color! “Raw reds, raw greens, dirty grey paving stones--such faces! Why, this thing fairly shouted its facts. It seemed to say: ‘I’m dirty, I am commonplace, I am grim, I am shabby, but I am life.’ And there was no apologizing for anything in it, no glossing anything over. Bang! Smash! Crack! came the facts one after another, with a bitter, brutal insistence on their so-ness. Why ... he had seen somewhere a street that looked like this, and there it was--dirty, sad, slovenly, immoral, drunken,--anything, everything, but here it was.” Another critic saw beauty through it all. He found in Eugene’s works a true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the ability to endow color--not with its photographic value ...--but with its higher spiritual significance; the ability to indict life with its own grossness ... in order that mayhap it may heal itself; the ability to see wherein is beauty--even in shame and pathos and degradation. This passage is important in that it shows us the author himself trying to draw his own portrait through Eugene Witla, remarkably resembling a portrait for better or for worse. To come back to “The Genius,” we follow Eugene Witla along his artistic career, as we accompany him to Chicago and New York,--and Dreiser gives us very deft sketches of these cities. Eugene of course is going to fall in love. After a bio-chemical courtship he marries Angela, a purely instinctive woman like Jennie Gerhardt and the mistresses of Frank Cowperwood. He won’t be faithful to her very long. Eugene is a born polygamist and pretty soon his sexual excesses will jeopardize his career and seriously threaten his health. Lust is a serious obstacle to art. Dreiser’s narrative becomes disconcerting at this point. We took the book so far as a dramatic demonstration of the dangers of sex experience for an artist. We felt ourselves brought to a climax when Eugene was going to be shipwrecked on the rocks of eroticism. What was he going to do between sheer lust and “genius”? The conflict promised to be truly dramatic and instructive morally and psychologically. Hurstwood in “Sister Carrie” had fallen into a similar pitfall and shown Eugene the way to perdition. But no, Eugene does not go to the dogs. Dreiser is too indifferent to dramatization and too honest an artist to bring his books to such a climax. “The Genius” is not a sermon. Eugene recovers and we find him at the dénouement reading Herbert Spencer and Christian Science in the company of his daughter. How could the American Comstocks find fault with such a moral and happy ending, and how could they miss the epical lesson of the book, as literally emphasized by the author himself? Eugene Witla made a