Dreiser’s matter-of-fact method of reporting helped him to indict Clyde Griffiths as only an expert criminal lawyer could do it. His technique in the presentation of the case is perfect. It makes us wonder if he did not miss his vocation when he bartered the bar for the writing desk of a novelist. But the psychology of the book is still more interesting than its knowledge of the code. “An American Tragedy” is a most original attempt to detect the instillation of a criminal thought into a man’s brain. Did anybody ever give a more exact, penetrating and dramatic account of how the idea of crime can invade a mind and gradually anesthetize the whole moral system of the criminal? Dreiser shows himself an expert and an explorer of the field of abnormal psychology by the way he marshals what may be called instinctive logics, the logics of our blood and flesh, against rational logic, and by the way he detects the obscure sophistications of the inhibited and repressed, to find motives which come to their selfish ends. Freud and the psychoanalysts are beaten at their own game. The scenes of the book which show us the plan of the crime brewing in Clyde Griffiths’ mind are tantamount to magic divination. Those pages on the function of the will must be recommended to professional psychologists and criminologists. If Dreiser’s views on the subject were accepted, our whole system of criminal legislation ought to be amended. The criminal for Dreiser is like God for Renan. He is not in the _esse_ but in the _fieri_. He is not a fact but only a possibility. Crime for Dreiser is something which cannot be indicted because it cannot be weighed. The allegory of Justice as a figure bearing a pair of scales is a lie. To define better, Dreiser dissociates. His unflinching analysis leaves very little room for fully deliberate intention on the part of the criminal. According to this new diagnostic of the criminal mind, a criminal thought operates like a microbe and it follows an homeopathic process. It never becomes obvious, clear or exclusive enough to allow the use of the word “responsibility” in its current acceptance. Responsibility for a crime supposes a conception of the human mind and will which bio-chemistry contradicts. Such is Theodore Dreiser’s attitude in regard to the problem of crime. It is no longer for him, as it was for Hawthorne, a question of conscience but of nerves; not a problem of psychology but of physiology. He gave a most dramatic support to these views in several scenes of “An American Tragedy,” and in particular in the scene of Roberta’s drowning. Was the drowning the result of premeditation on the part of Griffiths, or was it not purely accidental? Who can tell? His conduct as a criminal is a series of gropings through the dark, of hesitations, of advance and retreat in the half-voluntary direction of an act in way of accomplishment, without much self-control and still less deliberate intention.