: A Book of Prefaces by Mencken H L Henry Louis - American literature History and criticism; Conrad Joseph 1857-1924 Criticism and interpretation; Dreiser Theodore 1871-1945 Criticism and interpretation; Huneker James 1857-1921 Criticism and interpretation

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At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate. When criticism is not merely an absurd effort to chase him out of court because his ideas are not orthodox, as the Victorians tried to chase out Darwin and Swinburne, and their predecessors pursued Shelley and Byron, it is too often designed to identify him with some branch or other of "radical" poppycock, and so credit him with purposes he has never imagined. Thus Chautauqua pulls and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle ground there proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of him by labelling him. One faction maintains that he is a realist; another calls him a naturalist; a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist. This debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has come a valuation by Lawrence Gilman which perhaps strikes very close to the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman, "a sentimental mystic who employs the mimetic gestures of the realist." This judgment is apt in particular and sound in general. No such thing as a pure method is possible in the novel. Plain realism, as in Gorky's "Nachtasyl" and the war stories of Ambrose Bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if we ever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their artistic combination, as in life itself, that fetches us--the subtle projection of the concrete muddle that is living against the ideal orderliness that we reach out for--the eternal war of experience and aspiration--the contrast between the world as it is and the world as it might be or ought to be. Dreiser describes the thing that he sees, laboriously and relentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is behind it. "He gives you," continues Mr. Gilman, "a sense of actuality; but he gives you more than that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoric irrelevancies, ... emerges a sense of the infinite sadness and mystery of human life."...

FOOTNOTES:

For example, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, which runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10,000 pages, Huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and his remarkable mastery of English is barely mentioned in passing. His two debates with Gladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of the century, are not noticed at all.

A Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1909.

Life, Art and America, p. 5.

The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday.

A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900.

New York, The Century Co., 1916.

Despite the comstockian attack, Dreiser is still fairly well represented on the shelves of American public libraries. A canvas of the libraries of the 25 principal cities gives the following result, an X indicating that the corresponding book is catalogued, and a - that is not:

Sister Carrie | Jennie Gerhardt | | The Financier | | | The Titan | | | | A Traveler at Forty | | | | | The "Genius" | | | | | | Plays of the Natural | | | | | | | A Hoosier Holiday | | | | | | | | New York X - - X X X X X Boston - - - - X - X - Chicago X X X X X X X X Philadelphia X X X X X X X X Washington - - - - X - X - Baltimore - - - - X - - - Pittsburgh - - X X X X - X New Orleans - - - - - - - - Denver X X X X X X X X San Francisco X X X X X - - X St. Louis X X X X X - X - Cleveland X X X X - X X - Providence - - - - - - - - Los Angeles X X X X X X X X Indianapolis X X X - X - X X Louisville X X - X X X X X St. Paul X X - - X - X X Minneapolis X X X - X - X - Cincinnati X X X - X - X X Kansas City X X X X X X X X Milwaukee - - - - X - X X Newark X X X X X X X X Detroit X X X - X X X X Seattle X X - - X - X X Hartford - - - - - - - X

This table shows that but two libraries, those of Providence and New Orleans, bar Dreiser altogether. The effect of alarms from newspaper reviewers is indicated by the scant distribution of The "Genius," which is barred by 14 of the 25. It should be noted that some of these libraries issue certain of the books only under restrictions. This I know to be the case in Louisville, Los Angeles, Newark and Cleveland. The Newark librarian informs me that Jennie Gerhardt is to be removed altogether, presumably in response to some protest from local Comstocks. In Chicago The "Genius" has been stolen, and on account of the withdrawal of the book the Public Library has been unable to get another copy.

JAMES HUNEKER

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