mistake, we are told, when he failed to see the danger which eroticism caused his “genius.” Love-making may be a spiritual incentive for an artist but it can paralyze his physical energies: He did not realize ... that he was, aside from his art, living a life which might rob talent of its finest flavor, discolor the aspect of the world for himself, take scope from imagination and hamper effort with nervous irritation, and make accomplishment impossible. He had no knowledge of the effect of one’s sexual life upon one’s work, nor what such a life, when badly arranged, can do to a perfect art--how it can distort the sense of color, weaken that balanced judgment of character which is so essential to a normal interpretation of life, make all striving hopeless, take from art its most joyous conception, make life itself seem unimportant and death a relief. This sounds like rather commonplace ethics and not worth a thousand pages of demonstration, but it constitutes on the part of the author a formal moral commitment. It must again be quoted to show that Theodore Dreiser is much less amoral than he seems to be. The fact that he failed once more in dramatizing his point is due to a flaw in his philosophy. The doctrine of the _inevitable equation_ is, so to speak, anti-catastrophic, and certainly it is anti-dramatic. Where there is no place for conscience, remorse and conversion, there is no place for climax and anticlimax, and consequently none for the drama. Dreiser’s philosophy of positivism is responsible for this lack of dynamism which mars his books. His art, like his point of view, can only be strictly static. Hence the tediousness of his novels and particularly that of “The Genius.” * * * * * This again largely accounts for the qualities and the defects of “An American Tragedy,” Dreiser’s latest novel. The title of the book remains enigmatic,--or is it too obvious? What has America to do with Clyde Griffiths’ murder, and if it has, why not denounce it more specifically? This last novel is the story of a crime and a criminal strung out into two volumes. It was not the first contribution of the author to criminology. The problem of crime had already been on his mind. He dealt with it in his play called “The Hand of the Potter.”