Granted, he might reasonably argue, that the plight and stature of all mankind are essentially so mean, the novelist need not seriously bother himself with the task of looking about for its heroic figures.  Plain stories of plain people are as valuable as any others.  Since all larger doctrines and ideals are likely to be false in a precarious world, it is best to stick as close as possible to the individual.  When the individual is sincere he has at least some positive attributes; his record may have a genuine significance for others if it is presented with absolute candor.  Indeed, we can partially escape from the general meaninglessness of life at large by being or studying individuals who are sincere, and who are therefore the origins and centers of some kind of reality.

That the sincerity which Mr. Dreiser practises differs in some respects from that of any other American novelist, no matter how truthful, must be referred to one special quality of his own temperament.  Historically he has his fellows:  he belongs with the movement toward naturalism which came to America when Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, partly as a protest against the bland realism which Howells expounded, were dissenting in their various dialects from the reticences and the romances then current.  Personally Mr. Dreiser displays, almost alone among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a better native term we have to call the peasant type—­the type to which Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to.

Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of village habits and prejudices—­still he carries wherever he goes the true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant’s bald frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity.  How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short story When the Old Century Was New, an attempt to reconstruct in fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another age than his own.  This same simplicity of outlook makes A Traveler at Forty so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain.  While it is true that Mr. Dreiser’s plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor essentially inheres in his nature:  he thinks in blunt terms before he speaks in them.  He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and intricate themes—­finance and sex and art—­which interest him above all others.