On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance.  The career of Cowperwood in The Financier and The Titan, a career notoriously based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise his virtue of patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues generally to convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood’s business enterprises.  The American financier, after all, has rarely had much subtlety in his make-up.  Single-minded, tough-skinned, ruthless, “suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and the like are invented,” he shoulders and hurls his bulk through a sea of troubles and carries off his spoils.  Such a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. Dreiser understands.  He understands the march of desire to its goal.  He seems always to have been curious regarding the large operations of finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the intoxication of golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in The Jew of Malta, and on his cynical side struck by the mechanism of craft and courage and indomitable impulse which the financier employs.  Mr. Dreiser writes, it is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood’s adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the naive hand of a peasant—­even though a peasant of genius—­wondering how great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at the mystery.  And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser more subtle.  You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all sure of the prize.  As it is, this Trilogy of Desire (never completed in the third part which was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray into London) is as considerable an epic as American business has yet to show.

Cowperwood’s lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous as those of the leader of some four-footed herd.  In this respect the novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, both of them annals of women who fall as easily as Cowperwood’s many mistresses into the hand of the conquering male.  If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover.  No moralism overlays the biology of these novels.  Sex in them is a free-flowing, expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually at war with the rules and taboos which have been devised by mankind to hold its amative impulses within convenient bounds.  To the cosmic philosopher what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate moment?