On this broad canvas of thought it is that Dreiser works. In his new novel he begins in a little town in Illinois. Out of the midst of a mediocre family living in the concentric provincialism of the middle west he launches his young hero Witla—a lad suffering from dreams and stomach trouble and a vague distinguishing unrest. His types are masterpieces. His style, shorn of pretentious reticence or rhetorical pomp, is the painstaking and poetical diction he revealed in Jennie Gerhardt. But he is not infallible. There are sentences, paragraphs which jar. Although his strokes in delineating character and situation are swift and certain, his language often seems lame, his words watery, his phrases trite. But these are as the flaws of a panoramic pen crowded at moments to a point of impatience and not the faults of a weak writer. The effect is untouched. His people breathe out of the pages. They are personalities. From beginning to end Dreiser reveals a psychology of character amazing in its range and detachment. Witla as a boy lives in Alexandria, Illinois. Dreiser traces the development of his soul and sex and struggle out of the blanketing bourgois of his birthplace. The young ’Gene answers the call of beauty, without knowing what it is that calls him. He comes to Chicago. He is a laundry wagon driver, a collector for an installment furniture house, a student of the old Art Institute, a worker in the art department of a newspaper. Dreiser traces him out of the half way stratas of Chicago to New York, to success, and then through a labyrinth of incidents all interesting and big. He follows him through one development after another until Witla, the painter, realizes himself. I cannot begin to tell what the book is about. It is partially a depiction of the struggle between an artist husband and a “good woman” who is his wife, partly the struggle between the flesh and the spirit of the same husband and the tale of their final adjustment. It is an Odyssey of a type of man in whom the future of the arts rest as they always have rested. In the 736 pages there are persons of every type. You will meet everyone you have known and many you have dreamed of knowing. Every shade of womanhood flashes between the covers. It is as a novel should be—complete. It tingles with the quick spasmodic life of the city, of the country, the factory, the field, the drawing room. And above all, it breathes the atmosphere of America’s art life, the lively, struggling workers of the studio.