_Theodore Dreiser as a Bio-Chemist_
Few books have been subjected to more discussion and criticism than
those of Theodore Dreiser. As a novelist, a short-story writer, an
essayist and a playwright, he never has coaxed his readers. Far from
this; he has even chosen to tire them out. He impersonates a radical
and an almost trivial realism. Critics in sympathy with his writings
ask us to place him in his own time, in order that we may understand
him. He is the historian of a disillusioned America, of an America
which sits anxious among its heaps of riches, an America which has
lost the romantic faith in itself. It is a country of ever-increasing
material comfort and luxury, of quick gains and of tremendous affairs,
a land where the dollar is as rapidly lost as earned. Philanthropy
abroad and merciless competition at home, “an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth,” sensational criminal trials, scandals and panics,--in
brief, the most stupendous utilitarian civilization that the world has
ever seen, a Babel of towers scraping the sky to make it rain more
money: such is America in Theodore Dreiser’s massive and conscientious
“The Financier,” “The Titan,” “An American Tragedy.” However, it would
be a grave mistake from the start if we catalogued him among the social
novelists, in the same class with Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair or Jack
London. He never tried to reform society by his writings.
His social studies are always viewed from an individual angle. He can
picture the American scene with the matter-of-fact precision of an
expert reporter, a reporter almost entirely devoid of imagination, but
with a love for scrutinizing the human heart. He is less interested
in America at large than in the Americans, and less in the Americans
than in humanity as such. This gives him a large outlook despite his
apparent narrowness. One of his familiar points is the disintegration
of a character under the pressure of the environment. Even when he
stages a social tragedy, as he did in “The Financier” and “The Titan,”
he locates it within an individual conscience.
Let us get at Dreiser’s pedigree by the same biographical method which
he applies to the characters in his books. He was born in a small
Indiana town in 1871. His father was an emigrant from the Rhineland
who came to America to escape conscription. Though a nonconformist in
politics, he was a strict adherent of Roman Catholicism. He did not
make a success of his life and may be taken as a prototype of what his
son calls the “undermen.” He had nothing Nietzschean in him. There were
thirteen children in the family, and Theodore came next to the last,
an offspring of that mysterious biological evolution with which, as
an author, he was going to be so much concerned. One of his brothers,
Paul, had an artistic temperament and was not without literary talent.
Theodore has drawn his portrait in “Twelve Men.” Paul Dreiser, or
Dresser, was a seductive Bohemian, a sort of Rameau’s nephew, several
of whose popular songs are still remembered. Of his sisters Theodore
Dreiser tells us that, like the Jennie Gerhardts and Sister Carries
of his novels, several of them eloped early from home in order to
escape utter poverty. Theodore himself had to set to menial work to
make a living at an early age. He took up odd jobs and after a hurried
flight through college, he began as a reporter wandering from city to
city, from Saint Louis to Chicago and then to Pittsburgh and New York.
He always felt an instinctive craving for living close to everyday
life and for observing things and people around him with a keen and
circumstantiated attention, which never excluded a sort of underground
and subdued pity. Never a sentimentalist, Dreiser was however always
deeply human. He completed his apprenticeship as a writer in the midst
of an intimate contact with life, collecting the material for his books
at first hand. While running errands as a reporter he would brood over
his impressions, in the company of a few enthusiastic friends, after
feverishly reading Balzac and Émile Zola. His friends encouraged him to
write about people just as he found them around him.
In these early days of his career Dreiser applied himself to the task
of hunting for news with the cunning and pluck of a real detective.
He had the gift of finding romance in everyday existence, and when
the time came to apply a meaning and a philosophy to what he saw,
he turned to Herbert Spencer for guidance. In 1900 appeared “Sister
Carrie,” which the censors vetoed immediately after its publication.
Then appeared in slow succession “Jennie Gerhardt,” “The Financier,”
the first volume of an unfinished trilogy, the second part of which
was called “The Titan.” In 1915 Dreiser published “The Genius” and ten
years later “An American Tragedy,” the history of a crime recounted
in two huge volumes. Let us not forget Dreiser’s short stories,
“Twelve Men,” “Free and Other Stories,” and “Chains.” From an artistic
standpoint these are the best things that he has ever written. And then
we have the autobiography of the author, “A Traveller at Forty,” and “A
Book about Myself,” two self-drawn portraits of first importance to the
study of Dreiser as an artist and as a man. His complete philosophy is
to be found in “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub” and also in many pages of “A Hoosier
Holiday.”
It may well be doubted whether any other modern writer has ever
succeeded in carrying the doctrine of realism as far as Dreiser has.
It was a heroic effort on his part. He himself tells that, when he
began to write, it was impossible to write realistic novels in this
country. Around 1900 idealistic America was nestled too snugly in its
mid-Victorian sentimentality, not to show its teeth at an American
Maupassant intent upon depicting life as it is. As Dreiser ironically
puts it, people were not accustomed, in those days, to “calling a
spade a spade.” They wanted shock absorbers and pillows all around
them. Their minds as well as their houses were all painted pink,
and woe to the fanatic who tried to besmirch them with drab hues.
Theoretically Americans pretended to admire Tolstoi, Flaubert, Balzac
and Maupassant from a safe distance, and yet their bookshelves were
loaded with the books of the mid-Victorian writers bound to match the
furniture. Dreiser does not deny that the mid-Victorians had something
to say about life, but they were afraid of saying too much. The great
English writers of the middle nineteenth century were well aware of
the vanities and lies of human existence, but they had pledged their
word of honor to themselves and to the public that they would never
reveal what they knew. Idealism spread a veil over it. The result was
that, like William Dean Howells, American authors displayed existence
only in its most smiling aspects of existence. This was the safest way
not to discourage optimism. Christian people could thus be happy. They
could lead quiet and respectable lives at home, rear their children in
the fear of God, go to church on Sundays and ignore trouble, provided,
adds Dreiser, that thieves, cheats and dogs gave them permission to
do so. In the books of the period men appear only as heroes. If their
daughters met with any mishaps, they were charged to some _ex professo_
scapegoats. Otherwise things in general look as if our first parents
had never committed the original sin. It was the duty of the writer,
the preacher and the politician to confirm people in this optimism and
to promise them felicity in this world and the world hereafter.
As for Dreiser, he was of a different type of mind. He called himself
an independent. He also was in favor of progress but he refused to
believe that it could be achieved without having a scientific view
of things. He refused to stand by any creed. He declared that Truth,
Beauty and Love were only vital lies and capitalized nonentities. Did
he believe in the ideal or did he deny it? One thing he knew, namely,
that man and the world are a fifty-fifty mixture of good and evil. This
was the creed of a realist and Dreiser has never adhered to any other.
He shows a real enthusiasm for facts. He can distil beauty from the
most trivial heap of junk. He himself has told us many times that he
owes his passion for the trivial to his experience as a journalist.
As a true journalist, and as a typical American, he is much more
interested in the news than in the editorials. This explains why
there is a complete absence of ethics and metaphysics in his books.
He rarely comments upon the actual achievements of his heroes. The
editorial rooms of a newspaper, we are told, are an incubator of lies
where ready-made notions are concocted to be swallowed at one gulp.
Humanity, progress, character, morality, the sanctity of the home, and
so forth,--these bribes for the fools come out of the editorial rooms.
A reporter, on the contrary, is only concerned with things and people
as they are. He does not wear gloves to write. He is after what happens
and not what should happen; not after an ideal but after truth. The
rule for the reporter is to get at the news and by the quickest route.
Let him report anything he wants to, provided that he can do it faster
and better than any of his competitors. The public must be served. The
public clamors for news. They must have it.
When he speaks of the reporter, Dreiser gives up all the ethical
standards. Truth alone matters. He knows that a good reporter shows
no scruples. He must get at the facts and to do this all means are
justified, even the trickiest ones.
With all his faults Dreiser prefers journalists to philosophers:
journalists, according to him, are free of what he calls the
“moralistic mush.” After having been through the journalistic mill
for some time they cannot be sentimental, and leave to other people
the ranting about patriotism, justice, truth and the like. They know
the fanatic for what he is, a man ready to make people swallow fairy
tales, and to draw personal profits from his hypocrisy. As for the
politicians, the journalists see them in their true light, selfish
intriguers who gamble with popular ignorance and passions. Even judges
stand to him just for what they are, _i.e._, men lucky enough to secure
good positions and careful to steer their boat in the wind of public
opinion.
Once Dreiser called on an editor and while he was waiting he looked
about him at the suggestive inscriptions which a mysterious hand had
written in unmistakable characters upon the walls. In true American
fashion those characters flashed for the members of the staff the
decalogue of their profession. EXACTITUDE! EXACTITUDE! EXACTITUDE!
WHO? WHAT? WHERE? HOW? THE FACTS! THE COLOR! THE FACTS! But Dreiser
fails to tell us that that day he found the essentials of his literary
programme. Not imagination, but attention--microscopic attention--is
his muse. No realistic writer has been truer to Locke’s aphorism
according to which there is nothing in our minds which has not come to
them through the senses. He owes to journalistic tactics not only his
literary processes, but most of the content of his novels. They are
borrowed in a lump from what the French call _faits divers_, _i.e._,
from the news columns. His great social novels, “The Financier” and
“The Genius,” are dramatized pieces of muck-raking. They leave very
little, if anything, to the imagination. They deal with a then recent
scandal involving a Philadelphia magnate. Dreiser did not have to
invent the story. He went to the spot to gather information and, as a
reporter does, he got his man. To build up his Cowperwood, Dreiser did
not need to use even one tenth of the imagination which Cuvier showed
in reconstructing the dynosaur. Dreiser is not a novelist. He is an
historian. Were it only for his sake, the word fiction as applied to
a presentation of real life under an assumed name and in an anonymous
setting, should be effaced from the English dictionary. Why invent and
imagine when reality is teeming with surprise, and why buy the “Arabian
Nights” when we have the daily paper and the last news? Dreiser never
had any trouble in passing from the composition room to the desk of
the novelist. He never went far for subjects. Let others go to the
South Seas, to Alaska, to Europe or the East, to find their heroes and
heroines. Dreiser sets his camera in the middle of the street. And--by
the way--who is the greatest idealist, the fictitious writer who needs
castles in Spain for romance, or the unflinching and intuitive observer
who can perceive an epic in the most trivial events of every week day?
Dreiser does not hunt for romance; he waits for it at home. The daily
paper brings him more material than he wants. He has listed for us some
of those thrillers that he can buy ready-made for a few cents. Here are
a few of them, fresh from the printing-press.
I. A young girl is in love with a young man whom her father dislikes.
The girl and the boy have been drawn toward each other by that vital
force which acts as a _deus ex machina_ in Dreiser’s novels (Dreiser
calls _bio-chemistry_ what Goethe named _elective affinities_ and G.
B. Shaw the _vital force_). Despite the father’s opposition the young
couple marry in secret. The groom’s parent is furious when he hears of
it. In a fit of drunkenness he kills his son. Only his daughter, by
telling a lie, can save him at court. _What will she do?_ And do we
need to go to Shakespeare or Corneille to find a thrill? What have
capitalized abstractions, like Duty, Law, Justice, to do with this
blunt, brutal and yet highly dramatic alternative?
II. A man is born with a passion for business. If he can make a merger
of several independent firms, he will be able to manufacture and
sell to the public, at low cost, a product which will make him rich.
But, in order to do this, he must face either one of the following
possibilities: (_a_) He can form a stock company with equal rights
for all of its members; (_b_) he can manufacture the article without
personal profit or loss; (_c_) he can share the risks and profits
of the venture with a few associates and strangle the competitors;
(_d_) or stand pat. Attitudes (_b_) and (_c_) are called moral. If,
on the contrary, the business man decides in favor of (_a_) or (_d_)
he declares war on society. What will an intelligent and aggressive
personality do and, once more, what have capitalized abstractions
to do with such a mighty instinct when it is confronted by adverse
circumstances?
III. A young man has committed a crime. His father realizes that the
crime of his son is his own fault since he failed to give the youth the
right sort of education. The law expects the father to surrender his
child, whom he loves with all his heart and for whose crime he feels
responsible. What will the father do?
There is nothing romantic about all this, declares Dreiser. This is not
romance, it is truth such as can be found at any time in the dailies.
Dreiser is satisfied with this kind of material. There is more than a
fortuitous resemblance between story Number II and “The Financier.”
The last-mentioned episode reads very much like “An American Tragedy.”
With his imagination of facts the novelist has been able to unravel in
many hundred pages all the possibilities contained in a few newspaper
headlines. This confession about his sources will save many scholars,
in years to come the trouble they have to face when they try to
identify Père Grandet or Emma Bovary. Only a romantic writer can think
of hiding what he borrows from life. The true realist, Dreiser or
Zola, is not ashamed of being caught, his camera in hand. The closer
the resemblance between the original and the copy, the greater the art
which produced it.
* * * * *
As a philosopher, as well as an artist, Dreiser still remains a
journalist. His novels are no more or no less immoral than a newspaper.
Why should we grant the newspaperman the right to record coolly and
without comment a crime or a scandal, and yet brand the novelist as
immoral when he chooses to do the same? Dreiser does not comment in
his novels; he reports. His philosophy is not ready-made; it has not
been elaborated in a study or in a pulpit. It was born in the realm of
chance and of current events, from incidents and accidents, close to
the morgue, the charnel house, the brothel, the slum, the hospital, the
police station, where Dreiser used to report. There wisdom came to him
as it did to Hamlet in the churchyard. Life is the text and our actions
are the comments. A loyal and sincere seeker of truth, Theodore Dreiser
never interposes his own personality between his characters and the
reader. In this respect he is still more objective than his master,
Balzac. He preaches no sermon. He shows things and people as they are.
If there is somewhere a conscience, it must be in the heart of him or
her who reads through the book.
Dreiser is a moralist, but he preaches his morals outside of his
novels. With one hand he composes his massive, clumsy and realistic
narratives, deliberately objective and amoral. With the other he holds
the pen of the traveler, the philosopher and the essayist. Read, for
instance, his admirable essay on “The Inevitable Equation.” It is
as clear an elucidation of the writer’s mind as could be expected.
This sort of double-dealing with his readers came out of the author’s
loyalty toward others and himself. A conscientious and skilful
journalist will not make the mistake of confusing the news with the
editorial matter. Philosophy and facts belong to two different orders.
The one is the order of the mind, the other that of nature. Better keep
them apart than to see one giving the lie to the other.
_Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas._
Outside of his novels Theodore Dreiser has often shown himself an
original thinker, and, even when his philosophy has lacked originality,
he has made up for it by the strength of his convictions. His outlook
on life is as little cheerful as that of Voltaire in “Candide” or
Anatole France in “Penguin Island.” The true realist, like a true
psychologist, is a born pessimist. Only the ignorant can be blind to
the human tragedy. Let us praise Dreiser for seeing the ugly side of
life without altogether losing faith in it. Experience has taught
him many a bitter lesson as to the place of man in the universe. One
cannot be a reporter and still sing every day Browning’s famous hymn to
optimism:
The year is at the spring,
The day is at the morn,
God’s in his heaven;
All’s right with the world.
Even a self-satisfied poet, at ease under the beautiful Italian sky,
can forget himself now and then and blaspheme. Not so Theodore Dreiser.
This is a sober and gloomy portrait of life, such as Lucretius used to
paint it:
Common dust swept into our atmosphere makes our beautiful sunsets
and blue sky. Sidereal space, as we know it, is said to be one
welter of strangely flowing streams of rock and dust, a wretched
mass made attractive only by some vast compulsory coalition into
a star. Stars clash and blaze, and the whole great complicated
system seems one erosive, chaffering, bickering effort, with
here and there a tendency to stillness and petrification. This
world, as we know it, the human race and the accompanying welter
of animals and insects, do they not, aside from momentary phases
of delight and beauty, often strike you as dull, aimless, cruel,
useless? Are not the processes by which they are produced or those
by which they live (the Chicago slaughter-houses, for instance),
stark, relentless, brutal, shameful even?--life living on life,
the preying of one on another, the compulsory ageing of all, the
hungers, thirsts, destroying losses and pains.[18]
Dreiser’s philosophy may not be very cheerful, but it is genuine and
far more original than could be expected from a writer of fiction.
Spencer and Huxley--not to forget Nietzsche--robbed Dreiser of his
religious beliefs and left him in a quandary of philosophical nihilism.
A summary of his creed may be set forth about as follows: There are
only facts. The moral and religious interpretations of life are
erroneous. They fail to cope with reality. Dreiser is a self-confessed
agnostic. The key to the riddles of human destiny will be found, not
in metaphysics, but in bio-chemistry. Idealism is a lie. Dreiser
has called himself a man longing for poetry and at the same time a
materialist ardently enamored with life. He doubts, on the other
hand--to use his own words--whether a human being, no matter how poetic
of material he may have been, has ever thrown over the scenes of this
world, material or spiritual, a glance more avid and covetous than his
own. His challenge to idealism rests upon the feeling that there exists
a gap between reality as it can be observed and its interpretation
at the hand of the professional philosophers. He is ready to adhere
to principles and to accept interpretations, provided that they be
in accord with facts as scientifically determined. Meanwhile he sees
little proportion between the world such as it is, and the creeds
or systems imagined on its account. Our systems of thought belie
experience. Ethics contradict bio-chemistry. There are people whose
particular interest seems to be to disfigure things as they are, and to
present man to himself as being different from what he is in reality.
This is hypocrisy. Life is not a harmony but a struggle. Our existence
is a tragic conflict of forces, aspirations, passions and energies,
all excellent in themselves, but perverted by irrational repressions.
Let us admire Dreiser’s frankness on this point. Man, to him, is not
a pre-Raphaelite seraph dressed with wings, but a being of blood and
flesh. Like Whitman and Jack London, Dreiser is full of an orgiastic
enthusiasm for the human body. He cannot help reducing the moral to the
physical, the soul to the body, and translating psychology in terms of
bio-chemistry:
In spite of all the so-called laws and prophets, there is
apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right
not to do, if you reach the place where the significance of the
social chain in which you find yourself is not satisfactory. The
murderer has under the written law no right to murder anybody. It
is perfectly plain that he has the right if he is willing to pay
the penalty, or if he can evade it. Conscience, this thing called
conscience, to which people repeatedly appeal, is, as I have
pointed out elsewhere, little more than a built-up net of social
acceptances and agreements in regard to society or the agreed
state of facts in which we all find ourselves when we arrive here;
in other words, all the things which we wish to do and be, or
avoid.[19]
In this unromantic universe Dreiser moves with admiration and delight.
At the bottom of his philosophy there is a calm and serene--but
disenchanted--individualism, very much like that which took Nietzsche
beyond evil and good. Dreiser accepts the struggle for survival like a
convinced Darwinian. He views life as a chaos of blind and amorphous
energies roused by mysterious and ominous ferments. The game of life
is that of the great individuals against the masses. Great men tending
to self-expression and self-expansion find themselves blocked by the
overwhelming numbers of elementary and gregarious humanity. Hence the
war between society and the élite of supermen. Dreiser’s evolutionism,
however, does not in the least imply an idea of progress. Change there
is, eternal change, mutation, compensation, and, in the last analysis
eternal return.
Thus Dreiser’s evolutionism is purely organic and static. It is
strictly realistic. The fact that a few great individuals emerge
from the mass does not justify higher expectations for the future
of mankind. Besides, they do not always emerge. Many dynosaurs and
superhuman giants fail pitifully and are buried alive in the mud.
Geology and anthropology endorse Dreiser’s pessimism on the subject of
man’s fight with the blind forces of nature.
Life is a struggle, but not necessarily a struggle toward the better,
as the idealists imagine. Though a fairly good Darwinian, Dreiser would
fain believe in the survival of the fittest. War does not ever make for
better. It slaughters blindly left and right, and the bravest, the most
daring and courageous are always the first to die, as the World War
proved not long ago. Dreiser’s supermen are a product of change, human
machines moved by vices and passions, greed and lust. They may win over
their fellow mortals, but they have to cope with Nature, Nature without
an Emersonian Oversoul, and all of them surrender finally to its blind
dictates. The man who wrote “The Titan,” “The Financier,” “The Genius”
hit the hardest blow to American idealism. He might well be nicknamed
the Homer of the heroes who fail, the Balzac of moral and physiological
failures. But an artist does not much care to know where the world
goes; he is chiefly concerned with life and motion. Where there is
struggle there is life and motion and rhythm, and this it is which
makes the world artistically interesting and attractive, and it does
this for Dreiser. Even from the utilitarian point of view (when it is
told), there is compensation in the existence of the giants. It would
of course be folly on our part to try to block the way of the lion and
the tiger. We had better carefully keep at a safe distance:
My own guess would be that we, or rather the race, are going on
to a greater individuality, plus a greater weakness as to its
component and clinging atoms, providing it does not suffer an
endless dark age of mass control or total extinction in some form
or other. Nietzsche appeared preaching individuality, greater
individuality for everybody who could achieve it, and to a certain
extent he was right. Greater individuality than the world has
yet seen will certainly be achieved by some.... If to have a
Woolworth Building, a transcontinental railroad, a Panama Canal, a
flying machine, to say nothing of literature and art, means that
we must endure a man who is dull, greedy, vain, ridiculous in
many ways or even an advocate of every conceivable vice in order
to twist his brain into some strange phantasmagorical tendency,
the result of which will be some one of these things, there
are many who would enthusiastically say, “Then let us have him
along with all his lacks or vices, in order that this other may
be.”... For my part I am convinced that so-called vice or crime
and destruction and so-called evil, are as fully a part of the
universal creative process as are all the so-called virtues, and do
as much good--providing, as they do, for one thing, the religionist
and the moralist with their reasons for existing. At best, ethics
and religion are but one face of a shield which is essentially
irreligious and ethical as to its other face, or the first would
not exist.[20]
Imagination has never been Theodore Dreiser’s forte, at least, not
the kind of imagination which soars beyond memory and adds fancy to
experience. Yet the essential of his philosophy will be found in
the first pages of “The Financier,” in the disguise of an allegory.
He tells us how, when still a child, Cowperwood began to doubt the
story of the origins of mankind as it is told in the book of Genesis.
The Bible did not give him a satisfactory interpretation of human
actions, so he turned to a fishmonger near his home. The fishmonger
had tubs full of fish. They gave him his first lesson in philosophy.
I cannot help quoting the whole anecdote as a faithful summary and an
illustration of the struggle for existence. The battle between the
lobster and the squid was indeed a natural prelude to introduce the
readers to the exploits of what is commonly called among mortals a
“shark,” and Cowperwood is one of the first brand:
The lobster lay at the bottom of the clear glass tank on the yellow
sand, apparently seeing nothing. You could not tell in which way
his beady, black button eyes were looking--but apparently they
were never off the body of the squid. The latter, pale and waxy in
texture, looking very much like pork fat or jade, was moving about
in torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently never out of
the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of his body
began to disappear, snapped off by the relentless claws of his
pursuer. The latter, as young Cowperwood was one day a witness,
would leap like a catapult to where the squid was apparently idly
dreaming, and the squid, very alert, would dart away, shooting out
at the same time a cloud of ink, behind which it would disappear.
It was not always completely successful, however. Some small
portions of its body or its tail were frequently left in the claws
of the monster below. Days passed, and, now fascinated by the
drama, young Cowperwood came daily.[21]
The size of the squid’s body decreased day after day and he wasted
all his ink ammunitions. The battle now was too uneven to last. One
evening, when Frank came back to watch it, he saw a crowd around the
tub. The lobster was still squinting in his corner and close to him
lay the squid or, at least the little that was left of him. Young
Cowperwood felt aggrieved. He had come too late to enjoy the most
thrilling part of the fight, but he did not miss its lesson. Such was
life! Lobsters and squids fought and finally one was bound to devour
the other. The lobsters fed on the squids, men fed on the lobsters
and--who fed on men? For days and weeks, says Dreiser, young Cowperwood
could think of nothing but lobsters and squids. This was a true picture
of life and of what it had in store for an ambitious young man ready to
start on his career. It filled him with courage and anxiety.
Dreiser will never forget the tub where the lobster got the best
of the squid, despite its camouflage. There at last you had a true
lesson in behaviorism and on the art of _stimuli_ and responses, an
ethics construed out of automatic actions. Henceforth human beings in
Dreiser’s books will be easily divided into two classes, those which
eat and those which are eaten, the lobsters and the squids. Crude and
elementary as this classification may well seem, it is based upon an
honest attempt to study life at close quarters.
* * * * *
Such an unsophisticated view of this world did not inspire the novelist
with much indulgence in dealing with his own country. Darwinism made
him rather harsh with democratic institutions. He is too fond of the
trivial and the commonplace not to cherish the United States. “A
Hoosier Holiday” is a faithful and, on the whole, an eulogious and
sometimes lyrical survey of America. This masterpiece of indifference
to the laws of literary perspective is, taken altogether, the most
suggestive collection of _Reisebilder_. Here is the American Middle
West photographed from life, an easy-going, happy-go-lucky country,
half modern, half patriarchal with his cornucopias teeming with corn
and cattle, half savage, half civilized, half awake, half vegetative,
more remote from Europe than the cannibals in Typee’s island. Dreiser,
the satirist, the philosopher and the artist, keeps a harmonious copy
all through the book for our delight. “A Hoosier Holiday” is a pleasant
medley of sketches, cartoons, soliloquies and lyrical outbursts. It is
the best book which Dreiser has written.
It is apparent that America is very dear to the heart of Theodore
Dreiser, although he does not spare her his criticisms. He loves her,
pets her and scolds her, as he would a child:
Dear, crude, asinine, illusioned Americans! How I love them! And
the great fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific holding them
all, and their dreams! How they rise, how they hurry, how they run
under the sun! Here they are building a viaduct, there a great
road, yonder plowing fields or sowing grain, their faces lit with
eternal, futile hope of happiness. You can see them religiously
tending store, religiously running a small-town country hotel,
religiously mowing the grass, religiously driving shrewd bargains
or thinking that much praying will carry them to heaven--the dear
things!--and then among them are the bad men, the loafers, the
people who chew tobacco and swear and go to the cities Saturday
nights and “cut up” and don’t save their money!
Dear, dear, darling Yankee land--“my country ’tis”--when I think of
you and all your ills and all your dreams and all your courage and
your faith--I could cry over you, wringing my hands.[22]
And yet he prefers America to Europe:
And why? Well, because of a certain indefinable something--either
of hope or courage or youth or vigor or illusion, what you will,
but the average American, or the average European transplanted to
America, is a better or at least a more dynamic person than the
average European at home, even the Frenchman. He has more grit,
verve, humor, or a lackadaisical slapdash method which is at once
efficient, self-sustaining, comforting. His soul, in spite of all
the chains wherewith the ruling giants are seeking to fetter him,
is free.
As yet, regardless of what is or may be, he does not appear to
realize that he is not free or that he is in any way oppressed.
There are no ruling classes, to him. He sings, whistles, jests,
laughs boisterously; matches everybody for cigars, beers, meals;
chews tobacco, spits freely, smokes, swears, rolls to and fro,
cocks his hat on one side of his head, and altogether by and large
is a regular “hell of a feller.” He does not know anything about
history, or very little, and doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t know
anything about art,--but, my God, who with the eternal hills and
all nature for a background cannot live without representative
art? His food is not extraordinarily good, though plentiful, his
clothes are made by Stein-Bloch, or Hart, Schaffner and Marx, and
altogether he is a noisy, blatant, contented mess--but, oh, the
gay, self-sufficient soul of him! No moans! No tears! Into the
teeth of destiny he marches, whistling “Yankee Doodle” or “Turkey
in the Straw.” In the parlance of his own streets, “Can you beat
him?”[23]
And yet--
At other times, viewing the upstanding middle class American
with his vivid suit, yellow shoes, flaring tie and conspicuous
money roll, I want to compose an ode in praise of the final
enfranchisement of the common soul. How much better these
millions, I ask you, with their derby and fedora hats, their
ready-made suits, their flaring jewelry, automobiles and a general
sense of well-being, and even perfection, if you will, than a race
of slaves or serfs, dominated by grand dukes, barons, beperfumed
and beribboned counts, daimios, and lords and ladies, however
cultivated and artistic these may appear! True, the latter would
act more gracefully, but would they be any the more desirable
for that, actually? I hear a thousand patrician-minded souls
exclaiming, “Yes, of course,” and I hear a million lovers of
democracy insisting “No.” Personally, I would take a few giants in
every field, well curbed, and then a great and comfortable mass
such as I see about me in these restaurants, for instance, well
curbed also. Then I would let them mix and mingle.
Dreiser’s patriotism is not blind. The future of his country fills him
with worry and anxiety. Looking forward as a philosopher, he looks upon
American civilization as upon a brilliant phase, though not a final
one, in the world’s evolution. Bossuet, in his discourse on universal
history, viewed nations and empires as many toys in the hands of a
divine Providence. Dreiser considers them as the playthings of Chance.
A faithful believer in the law of change, he has little illusion left
on the subject of the rights of men, brotherhood, freedom. Life is a
dream, and this great American Commonwealth, whose achievements fill
him with pride and enthusiasm, may well be also another dream:
Happy, happy people! Yet for the dream’s sake, as I told myself
at this time, and as against an illimitable background of natural
chance and craft, I would like to see this and the other sections
with which it is so closely allied, this vast Republic, live on.
It is so splendid, so tireless. Its people, in spite of their
defects and limitations, sing so at their tasks. There are dark
places, but there are splendid points of light, too. One is their
innocence, complete and enduring; another is their faith in ideals
and the Republic. A third is their optimism and buoyancy of soul,
their courage to get up in the morning and go up and down the
world, whistling and singing. Oh, the whistling, singing American,
with his jest and his sound heart and that light of humorous
apprehension in his eyes! How wonderful it all is! It isn’t
English, or French, or German, or Spanish, or Russian, or Swedish,
or Greek. It’s American, “Good Old United States,”--and for that
reason I liked this region and all these other portions of America
that I have ever seen. New England is not so kindly, the South not
so hopeful, the Far West more so, but they have something of these
characteristics which I have been describing.
And for these reasons I would have this tremendous, bubbling
Republic live on, as a protest perhaps against the apparently too
unbreakable rule that democracy, equality, or the illusion of it,
is destined to end in disaster. It cannot survive ultimately, I
think. In the vast, universal sea of motion, where change and decay
are laws, and individual power is almost always uppermost, it must
go under--but until then--
We are all such pathetic victims of chance, anyhow. We are born,
we struggle, we plan, and chance blows all our dreams away. If,
therefore, one country, one State dares to dream the impossible,
why cast it down before its ultimate hour? Why not dream with it?
It is so gloriously, so truly a poetic land. We were conceived in
ecstasy and born in dreams.
And so, were I one of sufficient import to be able to speak to my
native land, the galaxy of States of which it is composed, I would
say: Dream on. Believe. Perhaps it is unwise, foolish, childlike,
but dream anyhow. Disillusionment is destined to appear. You may
vanish as have other great dreams, but even so, what a glorious, an
imperishable memory!
“Once,” will say those historians of far distant nations of times
yet unborn, perchance, “once there was a great republic. And its
domain lay between a sea and a sea--a great continent. In its youth
and strength it dared assert that men were free and equal, endowed
with certain inalienable rights. Then came the black storms of
life--individual passions and envies, treasons, stratagems, spoils.
The very gods, seeing it young, dreamful, of great cheer, were
filled with envy. They smote and it fell. But, oh, the wondrous
memory of it! For in those days men were free, _because they
imagined they were free_.” Of dreams and the memory of them is life
compounded.[24]
This loyal citizen of democratic America is too good a Darwinian to
believe in equality. He sees the United States like the lobster and the
squid in the tub, as a land of bitter conflicts scarcely concealed by
humanitarianism, a land where the strongest coaxes the weak in order
to stifle him more effectively. As a philosopher Dreiser shows little
respect for the masses, although they delight his artistic sense. He
has little or no confidence in them. If any change for the better
happens in human conditions, we must attribute it to the supermen,
who are acting as Providence first for their own profit, but also
indirectly for that of the greater mass of mortals. Great men are the
sole palliation offered by Nature to the average mediocrity of the
human race. Dreiser’s partiality for the supermen has gone as far as
praising as the most wonderful of all books Machiavelli’s “The Prince,”
that bible of crafty and cynical statesmen. He praised Alexander,
Caesar, Hannibal and Napoleon like another Carlyle. These were men of
prey, sharks and vultures, but the energy of Nature was seething within
them with its most virulent ferments. As a masterpiece of bio-chemistry
they stand out preëminently among the _homoculi_. Of course the fight
with the giants and the dwarfs is unequal. The masses do not give the
supermen their chance. Dreiser bemoans that plight. Turning to his
country he waves to the captains of industry as the true reincarnations
of Alexander and Bonaparte. During a visit to the Vatican galleries he
was impressed, he tells us, by a striking air of resemblance between
certain American magnates and the proconsuls or the emperors of Rome!
This hero worship explains to us why Theodore Dreiser cannot refrain
from feeling some admiration even for such authentic villains as his
Frank Cowperwood. Biology and ethics play at the tug-of-war in his
novels. He cannot accept the criminal, but neither can he condemn him
without a mixed feeling of aversion and awe in the presence of his
strength. The call-of-the-wild lures him as strongly as it does Jack
London. He adores sheer force as an athlete does the sight of a perfect
figure, without any admixture of moral responsibility. He adores life
as what may be called the muscular display of passions. Without greed
and lust he gives us to understand that there would be no dramatic
pathos left in existence. So he wrote the epic of appetites unleashed.
In his novels Society arrayed with moral codes, judges, policemen,
jails and executioners plays the part of the Myrmidons in Homer. The
men of pluck and daring, the grafters, the forgers, and the like, stand
out like as many Achilles and Hectors. Passions and appetites, even
those condemned by the code, are the keys to human life. The truest
moments of life, although they may be the most tragic, are those
athrill with a great passion. Life is a perpetually self-renovating
process, the gushing-out of infinite forces hurled against all
barriers.[24]
This love of life as it is, along with Dreiser’s preference for the
bio-chemical point of view, must also account for the treatment of the
sexual problems in his books. Dreiser’s apparent cynicism on this point
is again that of the biologist. To detect the mysteries of sex he does
not need to turn to Doctor Freud. He brings everything to the surface.
Like Whitman, he sings a pæan to life in all its works. His pagan odes
to Life need only rhymes to be formal poems. Here is a hymn to the
Vital Force which betrays the true poet:
Life will not be boxed in boxes. It will not be wrapped and tied
up with strings and set aside on a shelf to await a particular
religious or moral use. As yet we do not understand life, we do not
know what it is, what the laws are that govern it. At best we see
ourselves hobbling along, responding to this dream and that lust
and unable to compel ourselves to gainsay the fires and appetites
and desires of our bodies and minds. Some of these, in some of us,
strangely enough (and purely accidentally, of that I am convinced)
conform to the current needs or beliefs of a given society; and if
we should be so fortunate as to find ourselves in that society,
we are by reason of these ideals, favorites, statesmen, children
of fortune, poets of the race. On the other hand, others of us
who do not and cannot conform (who are left-over phases of ancient
streams, perhaps, or portentous striae of new forces coming into
play) are looked upon as horrific, and to be stabilized, or
standardized, and brought into the normal systole-diastole of
things.[25]
Those of us endowed with these things in mind and blood are truly
terrible to the mass--pariahs, failures, shams, disgraces. Yet life
is no better than its worst elements, no worse than its best. Its
perfections are changing temporalities, illusions of perfection
that will be something very different to-morrow.
Again I say, we do not know what life is--not nearly enough to
set forth a fixed code of any kind, religious or otherwise. But
we do know that it sings and stings, that it has perfections,
entrancements, shames--each according to his blood flux and its
chemical character. Life is rich, gorgeous, an opium-eater’s dream
of something paradisiacal--but it is never the thin thing that thin
blood and a weak, ill-nourished, poorly responding brain would make
it, and that is where the majority of our religions, morals, rules
and safeguards come from. From thin, petered-out blood, and poor,
nervous, non-commanding, weak brains.
Life is greater than anything we know.
It is stronger.
It is wilder.
It is more horrible.
It is more beautiful.
We need not stop and think we have found a solution. We have
not even found a beginning. We do not know. And my patriotic
father wanted us all to believe in the Catholic Church and the
Infallibility of the Pope and confession and communion!
Great Pan of the Greeks, and you, Isis of the Egyptians, save me!
These moderns are all insane![26]
Thus speaks the American Zarathustra.
Theodore Dreiser was not satisfied with lyrical statements of his
philosophy. “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub” is a direct and almost _ex professo_
comment on the subject of life and conduct. Important qualifications
of his pessimism will be found in particular in an important essay
of that book, called “The Inevitable Equation.” Yes, Dreiser is a
moralist; may I say an Emersonian moralist? “The Inevitable Equation”
recalls to our mind Emerson’s famous essay on “Compensation.” Crimes,
monstrosities, lust and greed, the rascalities of Frank Cowperwood or
the crimes of Clyde Griffiths do not disturb the novelist’s serenity.
He does not feel the need, like Zola, of calling society to the rescue,
or like Dostoievski to resort to mysticism to make the world better. He
remains a positivist. Life is Life. _C’est la guerre!_ Call it God, the
Oversoul or the Vital Force, the ruling energies of Nature are blind
and indifferent. Never did Nature listen to a course in philosophy.
What does Dreiser care how the Vital Force will call itself? It is
enough for him that he can wonder daily at its wonderful display.
A volcano or a cyclone are not moral, but they are impressive and
thrilling. A world without dangers would not be an interesting world.
Moreover there is an automatic (or call it, if you like, providential)
Westinghouse brake somewhere in the worst furies of the monster. Nature
is a self-regulated energy. It manages alone to keep a balance in the
midst of its turmoil. The individuals and the masses counterbalance
each other rather harmoniously and this probably explains why the
cosmos has not yet been wrecked. Saints and poets compensate for
the greedy and the lusty. Saint Francis of Assisi atones for Frank
Cowperwood. This belief in compensation, or, as Dreiser prefers to say,
in equation, is the only trace of ethics to be found in his books, but
it was already Emerson’s ethics.[27]
Pity plays no part in Dreiser’s stories. His outlook on life is
entirely devoid of that quality. Yet he is less cruel in his essays.
An unmistakable undercurrent of tenderness and indulgence toward
mankind is present in them. The author of “An American Tragedy” is the
same one who wrote “Twelve Men,” a most touching, human and, yes, a
truly Christian book. Optimism is not absent either from “A Traveller
at Forty” and “A Book About Myself.” Outside the reporter’s office
Theodore Dreiser can be truly human. Then he gives up objectivity
and he does not mind helping his readers solve the riddles of this
world. After all, even in his gloomiest moments he does not deal
with the satanic phases of life with more complacency than, for
instance, Jonathan Edwards used to do. His impartiality does not
exclude convictions; much to the contrary. It is that of a judge who
suspends the sentence until the criminal has been proven guilty. His
indictment is then left to the jury, _i.e._, to the readers of his
books on the conscience of whom he relies. Few writers have known like
him the somber art of penning us in through hundreds or thousands of
pages without one single ray of hope apparent, and few could operate
a guillotine with the _sang-froid_ found in the execution of Clyde
Griffiths. Again, however, Dreiser’s pessimism is not without an appeal.
He has suggested in the same essays two solutions of the ethical
problem. In our fight with Nature there is first the alternative of
complete surrender, abandonment and acceptance. This is the choice of
the saints and the sages. The other alternative is to fight the fight
for its own sake, and to challenge the world on its own ground. If we
refuse to serve Nature we may well try to surpass it, and disprove
it. Dreiser seems very much in favor of those Promethean ethics. The
universal forces may well overtake us and beat us at the game. What
of that? If we cannot win, let us, at least, know that we tried. Here
Dreiser once more points out a moral, not of conscience but of science.
He revives Socrates’ dictum “Know thyself” and the world along with
you. This may be the best road to victory when all is told. Surrounded
on all sides by superhuman energies let us prove ourselves supermen to
meet them, and if we are ominously assailed, let us at least find out
the name of our assailant. If we suffer, let us gladly, proudly confess
it. As for Theodore Dreiser himself, he declares that a nook beside the
giant Prometheus on the rock would please him more than a seat in the
orchestra of Fra Angelico’s winged seraphs. This ethics does not lack
generosity and heroism.
When all is said, Dreiser the philosopher and Dreiser the artist go
hand in hand. He accepts the world as it is. Let it be good or evil,
a means toward an end or an end in itself, a providential purpose
or such stuff as dreams are made of, this huge mystery is in itself
something worth meditating and writing upon. What do evolution,
melioration and progress matter? When Dreiser returns after twenty
years to his native Hoosier village he is concerned with only one
question. Have his countrymen succeeded in enriching their sensuous
experience and developing their perceptive capacity, or shall we admit
that since the days of King Solomon, or Euripides or Shakespeare man’s
faculty to enjoy the world has not made any progress? Euripides’
“Medea,” the “Canticle of Canticles,” “Macbeth,” are just as true and
beautiful to-day as they were centuries ago. Have we moderns found
anything superior to the sensuous delight which these works of the
past allow us to enjoy? Can anything beyond be imagined? What have
time and space to do with the enjoyment of life? No mechanical device
can accelerate spiritual progress. Theodore Dreiser cannot be imposed
upon by the conquest of the air or of the asphalt. The Big Bertha
and the asphyxiating gas are not signs to him of human supremacy. At
present man does not any more understand the tremendous forces which he
commands than he did in his primitive days, although he can conceive of
still more tremendous energies than those which he sees at play around
him. Our response to the stimuli of Nature has improved very little.
There seems to be a maximum limit of sensations beyond which we cannot
pass. Who can quote a writer able to feel more keenly than Homer? When
Medea speaks in Euripides’ tragedy, who can speak better than she,
and who can say that her words are ancient or modern instead of being
simply and beautifully human?
In “A Traveller at Forty,” Dreiser devotes several interesting pages
to the Dutch painters. He recognized himself in these unsophisticated
artists, who found beauty everywhere around them. Nothing, according
to him, is easier than to soar into metaphysics, sentimentality or
mysticism. We ought to be grateful to those who can love life as it is
and make us love it without concealing its imperfections.
He praises the Dutch painters for giving us the most perfect expression
of common and everyday beauty. They were not romantic but human.
Theodore Dreiser envies those unassuming artists who were content to
paint the arrival of a courier, an evening school, a skating party,
a dance of rustics, a flock of wild ducks, the cows at milking time,
a game of backgammon, a woman knitting socks, a cat playing with her
kittens, etc. Still more interesting than the homeliness of the Dutch
masters was the exquisite finesse of their sensations, the marvelous
temperament through which even the commonplace became idealized.[28]
_Life seen through a temperament_,--this is art, according to Dreiser,
who has not forgotten the lesson of Maupassant and Zola. He defines art
as _an emotional and intellectual reflection of intuition through life_.