pen. But it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of
attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless and
shapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. It is as
if Dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the high
passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit. It is almost as if
he deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. The book is an
endless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to light
up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages of small type; its reading
is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has
forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. Mingled with
all the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. Certain
chapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the
fervid luminosity of "Jennie Gerhardt"; there are character sketches
that deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that the
thing is the work of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lumbers
and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of ponderous imbecility gets into
it. Both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposing
demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advanced
thinking of Greenwich Village. I suspect, indeed, that the _vin rouge_
was in Dreiser's arteries as he concocted it. He was at the intellectual
menopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizingly
toward the goatish days that were no more.
But let it go! A novelist capable of "Jennie Gerhardt" has rights,
privileges, prerogatives. He may, if he will, go on a spiritual drunk
now and then, and empty the stale bilges of his soul. Thackeray, having
finished "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis," bathed himself in the sheep's
milk of "The Newcomes," and after "The Virginians" he did "The
Adventures of Philip." Zola, with "Germinal," "La Débâcle" and "La
Terre" behind him, recreated himself horribly with "Fécondité." Tolstoi,
after "Anna Karenina," wrote "What Is Art?" Ibsen, after "Et Dukkehjem"
and "Gengangere," wrote "Vildanden." The good God himself, after all
the magnificence of Kings and Chronicles, turned Dr. Frank Crane and so
botched his Writ with Proverbs.... A weakness that we must allow for.
Whenever Dreiser, abandoning his fundamental scepticism, yields to the
irrepressible human (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, to
moralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. Observe "The 'Genius,'" and
parts of "A Hoosier Holiday" and of "A Traveler at Forty," and of "Plays
of the Natural and the Supernatural." But in this very absurdity, it
seems to me, there is a subtle proof that his fundamental scepticism is
sound....
I mention the "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural." They are
ingenious and sometimes extremely effective, but their significance is
not great. The two that are "of the natural" are "The Girl in the
Coffin" and "Old Ragpicker," the first a laborious evocation of the
gruesome, too long by half, and the other an experiment in photographic
realism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. All five plays
"of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as it
were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the
background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the
operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The
technical trick is well managed. It would be easy for such
four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least two
cases, to wit, in "The Blue Sphere" and "In the Dark," they go off with
an air. Superficially, these plays "of the supernatural" seem to show an
abandonment to the wheezy, black bombazine mysticism which crops up
toward the end of "The 'Genius.'" But that mysticism, at bottom, is no
more than the dreiserian scepticism made visible. "For myself," says
Dreiser somewhere, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what
love is, what hope is." And in another place: "I admit a vast compulsion
which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or
impulses." The jokers behind the arras pull the strings. It is pretty,
but what is it all about?... The criticism which deals only with
externals sees "Sister Carrie" as no more than a deft adventure into
realism. Dreiser is praised, when he is praised at all, for making
Carrie so clear, for understanding her so well. But the truth is, of
course, that his achievement consists precisely in making patent the
impenetrable mystery of her, and of the tangled complex of striving and
aspiration of which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sense
that "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not a book of glib
explanations, of ready formulae; it is, above all else, a book of
wonder....
Of "A Traveler at Forty" I have spoken briefly. It is heavy with the
obvious; the most interesting thing in it is the fact that Dreiser had
never seen St. Peter's or Piccadilly Circus until he was too old for
either reverence or romance. "A Hoosier Holiday" is far more
illuminating, despite its platitudinizing. Slow in tempo, discursive,
reflective, intimate, the book covers a vast territory, and lingers in
pleasant fields. One finds in it an almost complete confession of faith,
artistic, religious, even political. And not infrequently that
confession takes the form of ingenuous confidences--about the fortunes
of the house of Dreiser, the dispersed Dreiser clan, the old neighbours
in Indiana, new friends made along the way. In "A Traveler at Forty"
Dreiser is surely frank enough in his vivisections; he seldom forgets a
vanity or a wart. In "A Hoosier Holiday" he goes even further; he
speculates heavily about all his _dramatis personae_, prodding into the
motives behind their acts, wondering what they would do in this or that
situation, forcing them painfully into laboratory jars. They become, in
the end, not unlike characters in a novel; one misses only the neatness
of a plot. Strangely enough, the one personage of the chronicle who
remains dim throughout is the artist, Franklin Booth, Dreiser's host
and companion on the long motor ride from New York to Indiana, and the
maker of the book's excellent pictures. One gets a brilliant etching of
Booth's father, and scarcely less vivid portraits of Speed, the
chauffeur; of various persons encountered on the way, and of friends and
relatives dredged up out of the abyss of the past. But of Booth one
learns little save that he is a Christian Scientist and a fine figure of
a man. There must have been much talk during those two weeks of
careening along the high-road, and Booth must have borne some part in
it, but what he said is very meagrely reported, and so he is still
somewhat vague at the end--a personality sensed but scarcely
apprehended.
However, it is Dreiser himself who is the chief character of the story,
and who stands out from it most brilliantly. One sees in the man all the
special marks of the novelist: his capacity for photographic and
relentless observation, his insatiable curiosity, his keen zest in life
as a spectacle, his comprehension of and sympathy for the poor striving
of humble folks, his endless mulling of insoluble problems, his
recurrent Philistinism, his impatience of restraints, his fascinated
suspicion of messiahs, his passion for physical beauty, his relish for
the gaudy drama of big cities; his incurable Americanism. The panorama
that he enrols runs the whole scale of the colours; it is a series of
extraordinarily vivid pictures. The sombre gloom of the Pennsylvania
hills, with Wilkes-Barre lying among them like a gem; the procession of
little country towns, sleepy and a bit hoggish; the flash of Buffalo,
Cleveland, Indianapolis; the gargantuan coal-pockets and ore-docks along
the Erie shore; the tinsel summer resorts; the lush Indiana farmlands,
with their stodgy, bovine people--all of these things are sketched in
simply, and yet almost magnificently. I know, indeed, of no book which
better describes the American hinterland. Here we have no idle spying by
a stranger, but a full-length representation by one who knows the thing
he describes intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost every mile
of the road travelled has been Dreiser's own road in life. He knew those
unkempt Indiana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the Indiana woods; he
came to Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo as a young man; all the roots of his
existence are out there. And so he does his chronicle _con amore_, with
many a sentimental dredging up of old memories, old hopes and old
dreams.
Save for passages in "The Titan," "A Hoosier Holiday" marks the high
tide of Dreiser's writing--that is, as sheer writing. His old faults
are in it, and plentifully. There are empty, brackish phrases enough,
God knows--"high noon" among them. But for all that, there is an
undeniable glow in it; it shows, in more than one place, an approach to
style; the mere wholesaler of words has become, in some sense a
connoisseur, even a voluptuary. The picture of Wilkes-Barre girt in by
her hills is simply done, and yet there is imagination in it, and
touches of brilliance. The sombre beauty of the Pennsylvania mountains
is vividly transferred to the page. The towns by the wayside are
differentiated, swiftly drawn, made to live. There are excellent
sketches of people--a courtly hotelkeeper in some God-forsaken hamlet,
his self-respect triumphing over his wallow; a group of babbling Civil
War veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible jests; the half-grown
beaux and belles of the summer resorts, enchanted and yet a bit
staggered by the awakening of sex; Booth _père_ and his sinister
politics; broken and forgotten men in the Indiana towns; policemen,
waitresses, farmers, country characters; Dreiser's own people--the boys
and girls of his youth; his brother Paul, the Indiana Schneckenburger
and Francis Scott Key; his sisters and brothers; his beaten, hopeless,
pious father; his brave and noble mother. The book is dedicated to this
mother, now long dead, and in a way it is a memorial to her, a monument
to affection. Life bore upon her cruelly; she knew poverty at its lowest
ebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in her a touch of
fineness that never yielded, a gallant spirit that faced and fought
things through. One thinks, somehow, of the mother of Gounod.... Her son
has not forgotten her. His book is her epitaph. He enters into her
presence with love and with reverence and with something not far from
awe....
As for the rest of the Dreiser compositions, I leave them to your
curiosity.
§ 6
Dr. William Lyon Phelps, the Lampson professor of English language and
literature at Yale, opens his chapter on Mark Twain in his "Essays on
Modern Novelists" with a humorous account of the critical imbecility
which pursued Mark in his own country down to his last years. The
favourite national critics of that era (and it extended to 1895, at the
least) were wholly blind to the fact that he was a great artist. They
admitted him, somewhat grudgingly, a certain low dexterity as a clown,
but that he was an imaginative writer of the first rank, or even of the
fifth rank, was something that, in their insanest moments, never so much
as occurred to them. Phelps cites, in particular, an ass named Professor
Richardson, whose "American Literature," it appears, "is still a
standard work" and "a deservedly high authority"--apparently in
colleges. In the 1892 edition of this _magnum opus_, Mark is dismissed
with less than four lines, and ranked below Irving, Holmes and
Lowell--nay, actually below Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V.
Nasby! The thing is fabulous, fantastic, _unglaublich_--but nevertheless
true. Lacking the "higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater
humourists" (_exempli gratia_, Rabelais, Molière, Aristophanes!!), Mark
is dismissed by this Professor Balderdash as a hollow buffoon.... But
stay! Do not laugh yet! Phelps himself, indignant at the stupidity, now
proceeds to credit Mark with a moral purpose!... Turn to "The Mysterious
Stranger," or "What is Man?"...
College professors, alas, never learn anything. The identical gentleman
who achieved this discovery about old Mark in 1910, now seeks to dispose
of Dreiser in the exact manner of Richardson. That is to say, he essays
to finish him by putting him into Coventry, by loftily passing over
him. "Do not speak of him," said Kingsley of Heine; "he was a wicked
man!" Search the latest volume of the Phelps revelation, "The Advance of
the English Novel," and you will find that Dreiser is not once mentioned
in it. The late O. Henry is hailed as a genius who will have "abiding
fame"; Henry Sydnor Harrison is hymned as "more than a clever novelist,"
nay, "a valuable ally of the angels" (the right-thinker complex! art as
a form of snuffling!), and an obscure Pagliaccio named Charles D.
Stewart is brought forward as "the American novelist most worthy to fill
the particular vacancy caused by the death of Mark Twain"--but Dreiser
is not even listed in the index. And where Phelps leads with his baton
of birch most of the other drovers of rah-rah boys follow. I turn, for
example, to "An Introduction to American Literature," by Henry S.
Pancoast, A.M., L.H.D., dated 1912. There are kind words for Richard
Harding Davis, for Amélie Rives, and even for Will N. Harben, but not a
syllable for Dreiser. Again, there is a "A History of American
Literature," by Reuben Post Halleck, A.M., LL.D., dated 1911. Lew
Wallace, Marietta Holley, Owen Wister and Augusta Evans Wilson have
their hearings, but not Dreiser. Yet again, there is "A History of
American Literature Since 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee,[23]
instructor in "the English language and literature" somewhere in
Pennsylvania. Pattee has praises for Marion Crawford, Margaret Deland
and F. Hopkinson Smith, and polite bows for Richard Harding Davis and
Robert W. Chambers, but from end to end of his fat tome I am unable to
find the slightest mention of Dreiser.
So much for one group of heroes of the new Dunciad. That it includes
most of the acknowledged heavyweights of the craft--the Babbitts, Mores,
Brownells and so on--goes without saying; as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed
out,[24] these magnificoes are austerely above any consideration of the
literature that is in being. The other group, more courageous and more
honest, proceeds by direct attack; Dreiser is to be disposed of by a
moral _attentat_. Its leaders are two more professors, Stuart P. Sherman
and H. W. Boynton, and in its ranks march the lady critics of the
newspapers, with much shrill, falsetto clamour. Sherman is the only one
of them who shows any intelligible reasoning. Boynton, as always, is a
mere parroter of conventional phrases, and the objections of the ladies
fade imperceptibly into a pious indignation which is indistinguishable
from that of the professional suppressors of vice.
What, then, is Sherman's complaint? In brief, that Dreiser is a liar
when he calls himself a realist; that he is actually a naturalist, and
hence accursed. That "he has evaded the enterprise of representing human
conduct, and confined himself to a representation of animal behaviour."
That he "imposes his own naturalistic philosophy" upon his characters,
making them do what they ought not to do, and think what they ought not
to think. That "he has just two things to tell us about Frank
Cowperwood: that he has a rapacious appetite for money, and a rapacious
appetite for women." That this alleged "theory of animal behaviour" is
not only incorrect but downright immoral, and that "when one-half the
world attempts to assert it, the other half rises in battle."[25]
Only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of all this _brutum fulmen_.
Dreiser, in point of fact, is scarcely more the realist or the
naturalist, in any true sense, than H. G. Wells or the later George
Moore, nor has he ever announced himself in either the one character or
the other--if there be, in fact, any difference between them that any
one save a pigeon-holding pedagogue can discern. He is really something
quite different, and, in his moments, something far more stately. His
aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing
he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out
of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them
that it is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal
and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a
finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by
college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in
"Pot-Bouille"--in Nietzsche's phrase, for "the delight to stink"--then
surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been
underestimated. What is the fact? The fact is that Dreiser's attitude of
mind, his manner of reaction to the phenomena he represents, the whole
of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from Zola,
Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the
midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of
doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point
of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it;
here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books,
and it might be:
[Greek:
_Iô geneai brotôn,
Hôs umas isa chai to mêden
Zôsas enarithmô._
]
If you protest against that as too harsh for Christians and college
professors, right-thinkers and forward-lookers, then you protest against
"Oedipus Rex."[26]
As for the animal behaviour prattle of the learned head-master, it
reveals, on the one hand, only the academic fondness for seizing upon
high-sounding but empty phrases and using them to alarm the populace,
and on the other hand, only the academic incapacity for observing facts
correctly and reporting them honestly. The truth is, of course, that the
behaviour of such men as Cowperwood and Witla and of such women as
Carrie and Jennie, as Dreiser describes it, is no more merely animal
than the behaviour of such acknowledged and undoubted human beings as
Woodrow Wilson and Jane Addams. The whole point of the story of Witla,
to take the example which seems to concern the horrified watchmen most,
is this: that his life is a bitter conflict between the animal in him
and the aspiring soul, between the flesh and the spirit, between what
is weak in him and what is strong, between what is base and what is
noble. Moreover, the good, in the end, gets its hooks into the bad: as
we part from Witla he is actually bathed in the tears of remorse, and
resolved to be a correct and godfearing man. And what have we in "The
Financier" and "The Titan"? A conflict, in the ego of Cowperwood,
between aspiration and ambition, between the passion for beauty and the
passion for power. Is either passion animal? To ask the question is to
answer it.
I single out Dr. Sherman, not because his pompous syllogisms have any
plausibility in fact or logic, but simply because he may well stand as
archetype of the booming, indignant corrupter of criteria, the moralist
turned critic. A glance at his paean to Arnold Bennett[27] at once
reveals the true gravamen of his objection to Dreiser. What offends him
is not actually Dreiser's shortcoming as an artist, but Dreiser's
shortcoming as a Christian and an American. In Bennett's volumes of
pseudo-philosophy--_e.g._, "The Plain Man and His Wife" and "The Feast
of St. Friend"--he finds the intellectual victuals that are to his
taste. Here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous conformity and
complacent optimism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty--here, in
brief, we have the philosophy of the English middle classes--and here,
by the same token, we have the sort of guff that the half-educated of
our own country can understand. It is the calm, superior num-skullery
that was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles out of Hannah More. The
offence of Dreiser is that he has disdained this revelation and gone
back to the Greeks. Lo, he reads poetry into "the appetite for
women"--he rejects the Pauline doctrine that all love is below the
diaphragm! He thinks of Ulysses, not as a mere heretic and criminal, but
as a great artist. He sees the life of man, not as a simple theorem in
Calvinism, but as a vast adventure, an enchantment, a mystery. It is no
wonder that respectable school-teachers are against him....
The comstockian attack upon "The 'Genius'" seems to have sprung out of
the same muddled sense of Dreiser's essential hostility to all that is
safe and regular--of the danger in him to that mellowed Methodism which
has become the national ethic. The book, in a way, was a direct
challenge, for though it came to an end upon a note which even a
Methodist might hear as sweet, there were undoubted provocations in
detail. Dreiser, in fact, allowed his scorn to make off with his
taste--and _es ist nichts fürchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne
Geschmack_. The Comstocks arose to the bait a bit slowly, but none the
less surely. Going through the volume with the terrible industry of a
Sunday-school boy dredging up pearls of smut from the Old Testament,
they achieved a list of no less than 89 alleged floutings of the
code--75 described as lewd and 14 as profane. An inspection of these
specifications affords mirth of a rare and lofty variety; nothing could
more cruelly expose the inner chambers of the moral mind. When young
Witla, fastening his best girl's skate, is so overcome by the carnality
of youth that he hugs her, it is set down as lewd. On page 51, having
become an art student, he is fired by "a great, warm-tinted nude of
Bouguereau"--lewd again. On page 70 he begins to draw from the figure,
and his instructor cautions him that the female breast is round, not
square--more lewdness. On page 151 he kisses a girl on mouth and neck
and she cautions him: "Be careful! Mamma may come in"--still more. On
page 161, having got rid of mamma, she yields "herself to him gladly,
joyously" and he is greatly shocked when she argues that an artist (she
is by way of being a singer) had better not marry--lewdness doubly
damned. On page 245 he and his bride, being ignorant, neglect the
principles laid down by Dr. Sylvanus Stall in his great works on sex
hygiene--lewdness most horrible! But there is no need to proceed
further. Every kiss, hug and tickle of the chin in the chronicle is
laboriously snouted out, empanelled, exhibited. Every hint that Witla is
no vestal, that he indulges his unchristian fleshliness, that he burns
in the manner of I Corinthians, VII, 9, is uncovered to the moral
inquisition.
On the side of profanity there is a less ardent pursuit of evidences,
chiefly, I daresay, because their unearthing is less stimulating.
(Beside, there is no law prohibiting profanity in books: the whole
inquiry here is but so much _lagniappe_.) On page 408, in describing a
character called Daniel C. Summerfield, Dreiser says that the fellow is
"very much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit than of foul
intention," and then goes on to explain somewhat lamely that "no picture
of him would be complete without the interpolation of his various
expressions." They turn out to be _God damn_ and _Jesus Christ_--three
of the latter and five or six of the former. All go down; the pure in
heart must be shielded from the knowledge of them. (But what of the
immoral French? They call the English _Goddams_.) Also, three plain
_damns_, eight _hells_, one _my God_, five _by Gods_, one _go to the
devil_, one _God Almighty_ and one plain _God_. Altogether, 31 specimens
are listed. "The 'Genius'" runs to 350,000 words. The profanity thus
works out to somewhat less than one word in 10,000.... Alas, the
comstockian proboscis, feeling for such offendings, is not as alert as
when uncovering more savoury delicacies. On page 191 I find an
overlooked _by God_. On page 372 there are _Oh God, God curse her_, and
_God strike her dead_. On page 373 there are _Ah God, Oh God_ and three
other invocations of God. On page 617 there is _God help me_. On page
720 there is _as God is my judge_. On page 723 there is _I'm no damned
good_.... But I begin to blush.