The first edition of the book was issued about twenty years ago, yet one reads it now with keen joy. With the exception of the essay on Nietzsche, which is somewhat obsolete, the essays on Zola, Huysmans, Casanova, and St. Francis have stood the test of time. One feels the breeze of cleanness, freshness, sincerity, and profundity. I may have an opportunity of discussing the book some other time. The other evening, at a gathering of “The Questioners,” I accused Miss Harriet Monroe and Miss Margaret C. Anderson of being too lenient editors, in not trying to mould the taste of their contributors. What conscientious editor would allow a writer of Scavenger’s caliber to descend to the irritating rhetoric of “The Dionysian Dreiser”? To print this loud exaggeration immediately after Ben Hecht’s _Songs and Sketches_ is to profess the rug-philosophy. The Scavenger, as most of his colleagues, is a reformed Puritan. He finds boyish delight in reading an author who is a professional fence-wrecker and convention-smasher. To him immoralizing is a virtue _per se_. He hails Dreiser as the greatest, for things that he has not done. Dreiser is a genius because he has not followed the conventional novelist who makes his villain repent or perish. I admit this; but such a negative virtue, significant as it may appear in given conditions, does not qualify an artist. _The “Genius”_ is not art. It is instructive, it is of great value for the study of contemporary America, as Mr. Masters pointed out. I can imagine that in the twenty-first century _The “Genius”_ will be used as a textbook for the history of the United States in the end of the nineteenth century, for the author has minutely depicted our customs and morals, has gone into detailed description of country and city life, of farmers’ menues, of stomach-aches and their cure, of Christian Science wonders, of salaries and prices, of all the infinitesimal particles that compose the mosaique of mediocre life. Instructive—yes; but art—by no means. Let me quote Havelock Ellis’s _Affirmations_: Three strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth a thousand of Denner’s. Rich and minute detail may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in the end.... When we are living deeply, the facts of our external life do not present themselves to us in elaborate detail; a very few points are—as it has been termed—focal in consciousness, while the rest are marginal in subconsciousness. A few things stand out vividly at each moment of life; the rest are dim. The supreme artist is shown by the insight and boldness with which he seizes and illuminates these bright points at each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due subordination.