What Dreiser does do is tell a straightforward story, tell it with all the painstaking genius of the old Flemish painters. And he uses for his background not the isolated strata of any single calling, but a country—your world and mine and our neighbor’s. Life is greater than any of its truths, sings Theodore Dreiser. There are many kinds of good, many kinds of standards and many kinds of virtue. There is the virtue of farmer Blue, the solid, masculine, clear and open virtue rooted in the laws of the land and the rigmarole of society; thriving on the long, brown roads, the ploughed fields and the homely beauties of existence. And there is the virtue of Eugene Witla, the aesthetic, vibrating pursuit of beauty rooted in the soul of the artist, thriving on the illusive lust of women, the intangible urge of inspiration; spitting in the face of laws unnatural to it and the fallacies that would be its fetters. Yes, says Dreiser, (I do not quote him), life is a wide field bearing on its bosom beautiful flowers that do not resemble each other and that require widely different care and nourishment. To think that such commonplaces should be distinctive notes in the art of a country! But they are. If you have read these things into novels before you have not read them into American novels. I do not recall a single hero in American fiction, who is not a Puritan, who does not suffer when he sins, whom the indulgence of his desire for women does not inspire to repentance and “reform” and success as the blue literary laws of America demand. For further particulars on this general subject see Mr. Mencken’s fulmination in last month’s Smart Set.