The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-06-06

I innumerable caravan of Burlesons, | Mitchell Palmers, Torduemadas, Cot ton Mathers. Four o'clock The fire burns low in the grate. A gray | fog without. Across the street two de-
 tectives rob a drunken man. Up at Tarrytown John D. Rockefeller snores in his damp Baptist bed, dreaming ! gaudily that he is young again and mashed on girl named Marie. At Sing Sing forty head of Italians are wait | ing to be electrocuted. There is memorial service for Charles Garvice 1 in Westminster Abbey. The Com stocks raid the Elsie books. Luden- dorff is elected archbishop of Canter- bury. A poor working girl. betrayed 1 by Moe, the boss son, drowns herself in the aquarium. It is late, ah me: l nearly 4:30 Who the deuce, then, is God? What is in all this talk of future life, infant damnation, the ouija board, mortal mind? Dr. Jacques Loeb is the father of a dozen bull frogs Is the news biological or theo- logical? What became of the Albi genses? Are they in heaven, in purga- 1 tory or in hell? |. |. Five o'clock
 Boys cry the Evening Journal It is today's or tomorrows? The question of transubstantiation remains. There is, too, neo- o-transcendentalism .. In Munich they talk of Expressionismus .. Poof!
 | ,- arr;,1
 man, beset by such reflections, and urged irresistibly to work them out on paper. Unluckily, the working out is
 not always as simple business as it looks. Dreiser's first impulse as novel; ist, I daresay, was to do it in novels to compose fictions full of ideas say ing something, teaching something, ex- posing something, destroying some- thing. But the novelist also happened to be an artist and at once the artist entered an effective caveat against that pollution. A work of art with ideas in it is as sorry monster as a pretty girl full of Latin. The aim of
 a work of art is not to make one think painfully, but to make one feel beau tifully. What Is the idea in Jennie Gerhardt?' Who knows but God? B.. lin Jennie Gerhardt' there is feeling profound tragic, exquisite. It is a
 thing of poignant and yet delicate
 emotions, like Brahms Fourth sym phony. It lies in a sort of intellectual
 fourth dimension It leaves a memory
 
 land wholly free from doubts, question: ings, head-scratchings. .. So Dreiser
 decided to make a serious book of it, a book of unalloyed ratiocination, a book in the manner of Herbert Spencer. The result is Hey Rub-a-
 Dub- b-Dub"-solemn stuff, with never a leer of beauty in it-in fact, almost furious Once or twice it grows a bit lyrical; once or twice 1t rises to the imaginatively grotesque. But in the main it is plain exposition-a book of speculation and protest. He calls 1t himself a book of the mystery and terror and wonder of life I suspect that he lifted this subtitle from an old
 review of H. L. M If so, then welcome!
 From him I have got more than is to
 be scribed in words and fnore than ]
 can ever pay.
 But what of the thing itself? Is it I good stuff? My feeling is that it isn't. More, my feeling is that Dreiser is no more fitted to do a book of specula-
 ton than Joseph Conrad, say. is fitted t, ply do not lie in that direction. He | lacks the mental agility, the insinu-
 ating suavity, the necessary capacity for communicating a sylogism. Ideas ] themselves are such sober things that a sober man had better let them alone. What they need. to become beara ble to human race that hates them and is afraid of them, is the artful juggling of a William James, the insurance
 agent persuasiveness of Henri Berg son, the boob pumping talents of a Martin Luther-best of all the bril-, liant, almost Rabelaisian humor of a Nietzsche. Nietzsche went out into the swamp much further than any other explorer; he left such pallbear- CTS of the spirit as Spencer, Comte, Descartes and even Kant all shivering g on the shore. And yet he never got begged, and he never lost the atten- tion of his audience. What saved him was the plain fact that he always gave a superb show-as good. almost,
 as hanging. He converted the prob I A.. villains; he made of epistemology a
 sort of intellectual bedroom farce; he
 amagamated Christianity and the music of Offenbach. =. We'll. Dreiser $ quite devoid of that gift skepti-