[In the following review of Chains, which was originally published in The New York Times Book Review on May 15, 1927, Stuart dismisses the collection as tedious and carelessly written.]

One of those clever Frenchmen whose perceptions every one is glad to remember, but whose names every one is resigned to forget, has told us that, in literature, all styles are permissable except one—the boring style ("sauf l'ennuyeux"). No critic with any self-respect, it may be stated at once, is likely to take shelter behind any such aphorism. In the first place, it strikes at the root of his own reason for being. In the second, it leaves the judgment of what is possible or impossible writing too nakedly at the mercy of an individual appetite for coarse fare. People exist, some of them very finicking over their own production, who make no shame in owning to an occasional relish for the corn beef and cabbage of letters. It is not by what readers will resign themselves to on occasion, but by what they would be content, at need, to live with, that a standard of taste is to be judged.

Even Mr. Dreiser's most ardent admirers, one presumes, would be prepared to admit some very serious disabilities in their idol. To begin with he has no perceptible sense of humor. The spark that can be struck out by the contact of two minds moving on different planes of intelligence and which is the most fertile source of the ludicrous, is out of his ken. He writes with no appreciable relish, being perhaps the most eminent drudge among our native practitioners. Syntax is continually presenting him with difficulties, as whom does it not? But instead of solving them as they arise with the contrivances out of which style is hammered, he has recourse to sorrowful expedients that Ring Lardner at his happiest could not better.

Yet it would be both unjust and absurd to deny that with all these faults goes an equipment that many a felicitous writer must envy. His patience is untiring. No one has written more convincingly of a man or woman thinking and brooding, because no one can more naïvely and convincingly cling to the trail of a thought, discarding nothing, selecting nothing, but following each sad convolution into its innermost recesses and blindest alleys. In this respect he has all the candor of George Moore, whom one suspects he follows in his own leaden-footed fashion, without the occasional frivolity of the Irish master. And only a prodigious memory, a faculty for impressibility that never lets the sharp edge of what has once been observed be dulled, can account for his uncanny power of so taking over the sensory apparatus of his characters that one cannot read his criminal trials without sharing in some degree the vertigo of the man in the dock, nor his murders without every silly, vulgar hue and cry registering upon exasperated nerves, nor of death in a tunnel accident without feeling the slime and ooze and drip underfoot and overhead.

One is hardly well started on Chains, a series of fifteen "lesser novels and stories" by the author of An American Tragedy without being plunged in a sea of slovenly writing. "Sanctuary" is the story of a sensitive tenement child born amid foul smells and fouler language, who falls into prostitution, is "reformed" in a home conducted by gentle nuns, leaves it to become the prey of a pimp and bully, and creeps back to it convinced that what has been assigned her as punishment is really the only condition under which life is possible. As we read it wonder grows that it can be humanly possible, talent apart, for any practicing writer to advance to where Mr. Dreiser had advanced, while retaining a construction and syntax that would bring down the blue pencil in any composition class in a high school. Worse even than the flaws in syntax are vulgarities of diction repeated over and over again so unbelievable in a writer of the slightest distinction that one asks one's self whether Mr. Dreiser may not perhaps be hovering on the brink of a new literary experiment and striving to convey banality of mind by banality of phrase.

. . . One of those suave masters of the art of living by one's wits, with a fortune of looks, to whom womanhood is a thing to be taken by an upward curl of a pair of mustaches, the vain placement of ringed locks, spotless and conspicuous linen, and clothes and shoes of a newness and lustre all but disturbing to a very work-a-day world.

Where all is so precious it is an ill task to pick out any one gem of language, but surely "all but disturbing" deserves mention.

"Chains," the story which gives the collection its title, affords Mr. Dreiser's talent its happiest chance. The musings of an elderly and doting husband, returning to a young wife whom he has married in an afterglow of passion and against all sense and reason, are retailed for us with unsparing deliberation. No one of the illusions at which men snatch under such circumstances to allay the intolerable bitterness of jealousy fails to find a place. The strange faculty of jealous and hapless lovers gradually to build up for themselves a picture of what they suspect, image upon image, and at the very moment that the phantom is taking on reality to recoil and fly back to the old drug of self-deception, has never been more convincingly identified. On this one essay Mr. Dreiser, it seems to us, might base a claim to be not only an investigator but to some extent a pioneer in a field that might be called sentimental pathology. . . .

It is not likely that Chains will unsettle the reputation of the author of An American Tragedy with those who hold a belief in his excellence an article of national faith, nor improve it with those who believe his reputation to be a victory won by sheer bulk and persistence and regard the place given him as not much short of literary imposture. Every writer has the faults of his qualities. What is most exasperating about Dreiser's faults is that they are not a part of his qualities at all. They are gratuitous ugliness and slovenliness, poor literary manners that have been suffered to persist (just why is his own secret) from prentice days, and to mar a thought which is, on the whole, fine, austere and pitiful. Their danger resides in the bad example they afford through the very eminence of the man who insists on practicing them. Nothing worse could happen to the American novel, already subject to danger enough at careless and disingenous hands, than a belief that genius can dispense with taking pains.