Witla, however, remains Dreiser’s calm, masterful argument against the one-sided perversions of the Puritan. Witla is a genius. What are you going to do with him, you proselyting blue stocking? Such a detached study in perfidious polygamy is enough to damn the very printers who set the type for the book. Here is a man of strong ideals, great productive talent, an indispensable contributor to life, who naively considers setting up an establishment for his pretty model just after he has proposed matrimony to the woman he loves at the time with all the finest desires of his nature; a miserable fellow who ruins and ravishes without compunction every shapely creature who crosses his path. He is without even unconscious morality, innate morality. Woman is beauty when she is anything and to possess beauty is the motive force in his life. His eye possesses the beauty of the city’s filth and dirt, the beauty of landscape, his mind possesses the beauty of books and talk and other minds, and his body the beauty of passion wherever he encounters it. Logical, natural, primitive and entirely artistic. But immoral? God, yes. No one woman can satisfy a man unless he deliberately stunts himself, is the Dreiserian Gospel. A man needs blonde women, brunette women, short ones and tall ones, radical ladies and conservative creatures—that is, a man like Witla does. And is Witla a supreme type, a distinctive Sanine sort of fellow? Not a bit of it. Whether Dreiser thought he is, I don’t know. He doesn’t say. But he isn’t. He is man and not artist in his “sins.” There is naturally more color to his escapades, to his “pursuit of beauty,” for he is the “genius” with an eye to shades and a soul for nuances not possessed by his more hum drum brothers. To him matrimony is naturally a pit, a degradation, a series of cages, for he is the eternal masculine. But how many men are there who have always been faithful to their wives? What? I do not know of a single one. In his high lighted type of Witla, Dreiser tells of this rudely, brutally and beautifully—with the indifference of a Juggernaut and the cunning of a magician. Really, you of the firm-fireside-faith, what is there to be done? Here is the Dionysian dastard who dares proclaim that life is a decent, orderly routine and that life is also a wild, warm passionate thing; that it is also a flame in which there is only one color, the red, golden color of youth. And the answer is—howl. A howl will go up, I swear it. It will start from the critics. I can almost read their forthcoming reviews as I close my eyes. “A sensually depraved and degenerate type.” “Striking at the bed rock of public solidarity, of home happiness, of everything decent and worth while.” And America’s reading public—“Horrible, filthy.”