In dealing with a creative quality as unusual and striking as that of Theodore Dreiser, it is of absolutely no critical value to content ourselves with a crude physical disturbance on the surface of our minds, whether such disturbance is favourable or unfavourable to the writer. It is, for instance, quite irrelevant to hurl condemnation upon a work like _The “Genius”_ because it is largely preoccupied with sex. It is quite equally irrelevant to lavish enthusiastic laudations upon it because of this preoccupation. A work of art is not good because it speaks daringly and openly about things that shock certain minds. It is not bad because it avoids all mention of such things. An artist has a right to introduce into his work what he pleases and to exclude from his work what he pleases. The question for the critic is, not what subject has he selected, but how has he treated that subject;—has he made out of it an imaginative, suggestive, and convincing work of art, or has he not! There is no other issue before the critic than this; and if he supposes there is,—if he supposes he has the smallest authority to dictate to a writer what his subject shall be;—he is simply making a fool of himself. There is an absurd tendency among some of us to suppose that a writer is necessarily a great writer because he is daring in his treatment of sex. This is quite as grotesque an illusion as the opposite one, that a great writer must be idealistic and uplifting. There is not the remotest reason why he should concern himself with sex; if he prefers—as did Charles Dickens for instance—to deal with other aspects of life. On the other hand there is not the least reason why he should be “uplifting.” Let him be an artist—an artist—that is the important matter! All these questions concerning “subjects” are tedious and utterly trifling. In _The “Genius”_ Theodore Dreiser has achieved a very curious and a very original work. In doing it he has once more made it clear how much more interesting the quality of his own genius is than that of any other American novelist of the present age. _The “Genius”_ is an epic work. It has the epic rather than the dramatic quality; it has the epic rather than the mystic, or symbolic, quality. And strictly speaking, Dreiser’s novels, especially the later ones, are the only novels in America, are the only novels, as a matter of fact, in England or America, which possess this quality. It is quite properly in accordance with the epic attitude of mind, with the epic quality in art, this reduction of the more purely human episodes to a proportionate insignificance compared with the general surge and volume of the life-stream. It is completely in keeping with the epic quality that there should be no far-fetched psychology, no quivering suspensions on the verge of the unknown.