_Theodore Dreiser and the American Tragedy_
In the preceding chapter I presented the general philosophy of Theodore
Dreiser. Let us now survey his novels in their respective order of
publication. The first in date was “Sister Carrie” (1900). We are told
that the author had to curtail a great deal of the material of this
book--a feat very unfamiliar to him--and this very likely explains why
his first novel, one of the most interesting ever written by him, is
the most in keeping with the ordinary canon of literary proportions.
Every reader will remember Sister Carrie’s story. Being a poor American
girl, she left her family to earn a living and started for Chicago with
scarcely a penny. On the train she met a smart “drummer” of flirtatious
disposition. Carrie stopped for a while with her relatives, but she
could not endure the misery very long. She looked vainly for congenial
work and finally sought her drummer again. He rented an apartment for
her and she became his mistress. She soon tired of him and became
acquainted with the manager of a bar, a middle-aged man with wife and
children, who left everything for her sake. This man was honestly
in love with Carrie and devoted to her to the point of committing a
theft, of which Carrie herself knew nothing. They go to Canada and
thence to New York, where Carrie’s lover proves a failure. The book
ends tragically and almost cynically by the man committing suicide
and Carrie going on alone to make a triumphant career on the stage.
The story, like most of Dreiser’s stories, is rather monotonous and
bleak. There is in it, however, an undercurrent of deep human pathos
and an admirable sense of human frailty. The author was clever enough
to make Carrie’s seducer sympathetic. The book is well composed. The
story is consistent throughout, and the plot dramatic from beginning to
end, which is rarely the case with Dreiser. The dialogues are true to
life and the environment very deftly suggested. Drouet, the “drummer”
is a fascinating “booster,” a George Babbitt _avant la lettre_. Like
most of Dreiser’s characters, he is a well balanced mixture of good and
evil. (A true villain does not exist in Dreiser’s novels, because he
does not probably exist in reality. His most monstrous characters show
now and then some good inclination or other. This is true psychology.)
A bluffer, an adventurer and a good fellow at heart, he is drawn
from life. Carrie, the central character, is much less sympathetic.
The heartless way in which she gives up the man who has sacrificed
everything for her is not very chivalrous. Once more we see in her
case Dreiser’s preference of the truly human to the imaginary and
the romantic. The real pathos of the book rests upon Hurstwood, the
“traveler at forty” led to his ruin by sex, as was Eugene Witla, the
hero of “The Genius.” It is Hurstwood who fills the dramatic center of
the book. He is the first specimen of moral disintegration presented by
Theodore Dreiser.
In this first novel of his the author had not yet given himself
entirely up to strict objectivity and he was kind enough to draw for
the reader the moral lesson implied in “Sister Carrie”:
Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward,
onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether
it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape,
or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in
some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It
is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and
the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor
content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you
long alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream
such happiness as you may never fear.
“Sister Carrie” is the tragedy of the thwarting of human aspirations.
It presents Dreiser’s favorite philosophy concerning the conflict of
society and the individual, the opposition of social and individual
ethics. Our instincts are good of themselves but they may prove harmful
to society.
“Jennie Gerhardt” was published in 1911. This novel follows more
closely than the preceding the rigid standards of objectivity set by
the French realists. Again it tells the tale of an abandoned woman,
but of a woman who does not possess the grit of Sister Carrie. Jennie
Gerhardt is a purely instinctive woman, and she pays dearly for her
surrender to the male. Like most of the women heroines in Dreiser’s
novels, she embodies the mysterious cravings of Nature. Poor Jennie is
not a superwoman, like Carrie, and the survival of the fittest does not
work in her favor. Like Sister Carrie she was born poor, an easy prey
to temptation. Her first lover died and left her alone with a child.
She became the chambermaid of a wealthy family and surrendered to the
entreaties of a young member of the household. The two lovers were
honestly fond of each other. The young man would have married Jennie if
society allowed. But this is not the case and Jennie is the first to
suggest that her lover give her up. He does so against his will, and
marries a woman of his own caste. Jennie remains alone. Her lover dies,
still faithful to her, and she keeps his memory all her life. That is
all. This simple drama is none the less heart-rending in its banality.
It was told by Dreiser with a sort of tragic naïveté like that of
Flaubert in “Un Cœur Simple.”
“Jennie Gerhardt” is a beautiful and most pathetic book. It is cleverly
written in a sort of monochromatic atmosphere, a _grisaille_ admirably
in keeping with the portrait in the center. Jennie’s father is,
psychologically, one of the truest and most human portraits drawn by
the novelist. Bio-chemistry had not yet blurred his critical sense.
In “The Financier” and “The Titan” Dreiser widened the scope of his
vision to a large extent. They both display a _tableau de mœurs_ about
a central character. These books tax the patience of the reader.
They are too long, too clumsy, too detailed, and yet they reveal an
unquestionable master. Cowperwood is a magnificent rascal, one whom
Balzac would have been proud to capture for his gallery of rogues.
It is Vautrin in a Tuxedo and behind a mahogany desk. Cowperwood is
a Spencerian animal of authentic pedigree, a superb plesiosaurus, a
Dreiserian superman _par excellence_. The reader of this book has not
forgotten how his vocation was revealed to him before the tub where
the lobster fought the squid. Cowperwood has no conscience. He is ruled
by tyrannical instincts. He has no more sense of responsibility than
a cyclone. Indeed, he has so little of it that he quickly becomes as
monotonous as an automaton performing on the stage under the disguise
of a real man. He was born to harm as the shark is born with teeth.
From the very first pages of the book until the end, he appears as an
indomitable energy, let loose on this planet. He comes from the same
zoo as most of the heroes of Jack London. Fate lets him be born in
Philadelphia and he mistakes the stock exchange in that city for the
wilds of Alaska or the South Seas. He knows of only one law, that of
the jungle, and in regard to ethics he is a perfect vacuum, the most
completely amoral person in the whole history of the American novel.
“The Financier” starts Frank Cowperwood on his adventurous career.
He wants to get rich quick and by any means. He steals the public
chest of his native city and, in doing so, comments Dreiser, he shows
himself neither better nor worse than the majority of his political and
financial opponents. Unfortunately for him, he is caught with his hand
in the bag, and sentenced to four years in jail. The energy of the man
shows itself in the course of this episode. Cowperwood’s stoicism is
worthy of a better cause, and it is, in his case, not the product of an
excess, but of an entire lack of conscience. He personifies the triumph
of bio-chemistry. We are given to understand that his misfortunes are
the natural lot of all those who revolt against what Nietzsche called
the ethics of the herd. Of course, when society jailed Cowperwood it
acted for its best interests. To cage a tiger is always moral. Prisons
have been providentially designed to give Cowperwood and his like
time to think. He is not at all surprised to find himself behind the
bars. The only thing which worries him is to know how he can get out.
He has lost everything in the fray, but he stands invincible on the
ruins of his own universe, ready to begin all over again without any
redemption or expiation, and certainly without any conversion. In fact,
“The Financier” is only the first volume of an unfinished trilogy, and
several hundred pages in volume number two will hardly suffice Dreiser
to complete the story of his rascalities.
“The Financier” is a powerful book. Dreiser gave free rein in it to his
passion for collecting statistics, and for making an impression on the
reader by arranging a mosaic of characteristic odds and ends. He piles
up evidence as a reporter or a coroner, without wanting to enliven
the testimony by any flare of wit or emotion. As a writer, he abjured
all rhetoric. If most of the time his novels prove indigestible, it
is due to the fact that he never inserts anything in them which can
divert one from facts. He writes in a lump, so to speak. He serves
us a heavy meal without any spices or gravy. His style is entirely
amorphous. It is ponderous and, one might say, elephantine. See how
Zola succeeded in putting zest and interest into his dreariest and most
objective narratives; how Flaubert and Maupassant added the human and
artistic touch even to their most matter-of-fact cartoons. EXACTITUDE!
EXACTITUDE! THE FACTS! THE FACTS! HOW? WHY? WHEN? Has not Dreiser as an
artist been misled by those mechanical suggestions?
And yet, Frank Cowperwood stands alive before our eyes; the whole
society of his time can be felt swarming around him,--politics,
finance, love, art, the criminal court, the prison. They are alike,
not as they would be in Balzac or in Shakespeare, in a great surge of
lyricism or pathos, but in a sort of vacuum ordered for them by the
indifference of the author. They are painted on the surface of the
canvas without any perspective and no play of light to animate them.
William Dean Howells knew better than this.
* * * * *
The second part of the trilogy is called “The Titan,” an ironic
title since, at the end of the book, Cowperwood proves a failure, at
least for the time being. We find him out of jail and established in
Chicago just after the big fire. His energies have not abated and
his financial career begins triumphant. We become involved in his
minutest rascalities. We learn from him how to bribe the politicians,
buy franchises, strangle all competitors, monopolize public utilities
to our own selfish advantage. Meanwhile, as an intermission, we are
lavishly served with the story of Cowperwood’s adulteries and liaisons,
until his boat is shipwrecked on the rock of a municipal election which
takes away from him the profits of his grafts. Cowperwood is now a
wounded giant but not a dead one. The novelist still foresees for him a
brilliant career and like the witches he sends him with his blessing to
a new destiny:
Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail,
Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of
individuality. But for him also the eternal equation--the pathos
of the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an
ultimate balance must be struck.... And this giant himself,
rushing on to new struggles and new difficulties in an older land,
forever suffering the goad of a restless heart--for him was no
ultimate peace, no real understanding, but only hunger and thirst
and wonder. Wealth, wealth, wealth! A new grasp of a new great
problem and its eventual solution. Anew the old urgent thirst for
life, and only its partial quenchment. In Dresden one palace for
one woman, in Rome a second for another. In London a third for his
beloved Berenice, the lure of beauty ever in his eye. The lives
of two women wrecked, a score of victims despoiled.... And he
resigned, and yet not--loving, understanding, doubting--caught at
last by the drug of a personality which he could not gainsay.
Cowperwood certainly breaks the record of human endurance and
obduration as a rascal. There must be no break in his career as a
buccaneer of finance, and neither must there be any conversion.
Tolstoi, Dostoievski or Zola would not have waited so long to restore
to Cowperwood at least the semblance of a conscience, were it only to
relieve the strain on the reader. Not so with Theodore Dreiser. None
ever proved more inexorable.
Bio-chemistry proves to be a more inhuman ethics than the ancient
_Fatum_ or Calvinistic predestination. The secret of our destiny is
written in our blood. We can resist neither our temperament nor our
instincts:
Each according to his temperament--that something which he has not
made and cannot always subdue, and which may not always be subdued
by others for him. Who plans the steps that lead lives on to
splendid glories, or twist them into gnarled sacrifices, or make of
them dark, disdainful, contentious tragedies? The soul within? And
whence comes it? Of God?
A dynosaur, we are told, possesses no more conscience than a lobster or
a squid:
That thing _conscience_, which obsesses and rides some people to
destruction, did not trouble him (Cowperwood) at all. He had no
consciousness of what is currently known as sin.[29] He never gave
a thought to the vast palaver concerning evil which is constantly
going on. There were just two faces to the shield of life--strength
and weakness. Right and wrong? He did not know about those. They
were bound up in metaphysical abstrusities about which he did not
care to bother. Good and evil? Those were toys of clerics, by which
they made money. Morality and immorality? He never considered them.
But strength and weakness--oh yes! If you had strength you could
protect yourself always and be something. If you were weak--pass
quickly to the rear and get out of the range of the guns. He was
strong, and he knew it; and somehow he always believed in his star.
This elementary psychology takes us back to that familiar gospel which
we used to hear from Jack London’s sea rovers. It is Nietzsche for
beginners. The human being would be too easy a riddle to decipher if
it were actuated only by lust and greed. Man in this case would not
be more interesting than, let us say, a Robot or a Ford motor car.
_Summum jus, summa injuria._ Dreiser’s psychology falls short. Frank
Cowperwood may be curious as an automaton; he is not interesting, even
as a rascal, despite his amorous adventures. Casanova was an artist in
philandering. Cowperwood was a machine, or, if you prefer, an animal.
Love is once more a branch of bio-chemistry for Dreiser. It is a blind
and purely animal impulse. It is good in itself like all impulses:
Whether we will or no, theory or no theory, the large basic facts
of chemistry and physics remain. Like is drawn to like. Changes
in temperament bring changes in relationship. Dogma may bind
some minds; fear, others. But there are always those in whom the
chemistry and physics of life are large, and in whom neither dogma
nor fear is operative. Society lifts its hands in horror; but
from age to age the Helens, the Messalinas, the Du Barrys, the
Pompadours, the Maintenons, and the Nell Gwynns flourish and point
a subtler basis of relationship than we have yet been able to
square with our lives.
This is outspoken enough and needs no comment. In “Man and Superman,”
G. B. Shaw also tried to sacrifice Don Juan to the Vital Force, but he
did it with a bit of salt and a few flowers. In the case of Dreiser,
this cynical outlook is without any irony, poetry or appeal. It is very
likely erroneous, but much less so than Puritan sophisms, and may serve
as an antidote against the romantic falsifications of sex appeal.
* * * * *
“The Genius,” published in 1915, is the most direct and important
contribution of the author to the study of sex psychology. The reading
of this enormous book is disappointing. The title is evidently
sarcastic, since the hero, Eugene Witla, blunders in life from the
beginning to end. A self-made man, an artist, a business man, and
above all a self-appointed superman and notorious erotomaniac, Eugene
is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of Dreiser’s theories concerning the
irresistible impulses of one’s temperament. Eugene has the soul of
an idealist. He craves for beauty and possesses a fine talent. His
paintings have made a great impression on a French art dealer, M.
Charles, and I cannot help quoting from the catalogue of his exposition
a passage which throws a great deal of light on Dreiser’s own realism.
The following is supposed to be taken from a criticism of Eugene
Witla’s paintings. Somebody had dared to compare Eugene with Millet.
This the alleged critic cannot admit:
The brutal exaggeration of that painter’s art would probably
testify to him of his own merit. He is mistaken. The great
Frenchman was a lover of humanity, a reformer in spirit, a master
of drawing and composition. There was nothing of this cheap desire
to startle and offend by what he did. If we are to have ash cans
and engines and broken-down bus-horses thrust down our throats
as art, Heaven preserve us. We had better turn to commonplace
photography at once, and be done with it. Broken windows, shutters,
dirty pavements, half frozen ash cart drivers, overdrawn, heavily
exaggerated figures of policemen, tenement harridans, beggars,
panhandlers, sandwich-men--of such is Art according to Eugene Witla.
M. Charles, on the contrary, is quite enthusiastic about Eugene. He is
not afraid of his painting of a
great hulking, ungainly negro, a positively animal man, with a
red flannel shawl around his ears, and his arms and legs looking
“as though he might have on two or three pairs of trousers and as
many vests.” What a debauch of color! “Raw reds, raw greens, dirty
grey paving stones--such faces! Why, this thing fairly shouted
its facts. It seemed to say: ‘I’m dirty, I am commonplace, I am
grim, I am shabby, but I am life.’ And there was no apologizing
for anything in it, no glossing anything over. Bang! Smash! Crack!
came the facts one after another, with a bitter, brutal insistence
on their so-ness. Why ... he had seen somewhere a street that
looked like this, and there it was--dirty, sad, slovenly, immoral,
drunken,--anything, everything, but here it was.”
Another critic saw beauty through it all. He found in Eugene’s works
a true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the
ability to endow color--not with its photographic value ...--but
with its higher spiritual significance; the ability to indict life
with its own grossness ... in order that mayhap it may heal itself;
the ability to see wherein is beauty--even in shame and pathos and
degradation.
This passage is important in that it shows us the author himself trying
to draw his own portrait through Eugene Witla, remarkably resembling a
portrait for better or for worse.
To come back to “The Genius,” we follow Eugene Witla along his artistic
career, as we accompany him to Chicago and New York,--and Dreiser
gives us very deft sketches of these cities. Eugene of course is going
to fall in love. After a bio-chemical courtship he marries Angela, a
purely instinctive woman like Jennie Gerhardt and the mistresses of
Frank Cowperwood. He won’t be faithful to her very long. Eugene is a
born polygamist and pretty soon his sexual excesses will jeopardize his
career and seriously threaten his health. Lust is a serious obstacle
to art. Dreiser’s narrative becomes disconcerting at this point. We
took the book so far as a dramatic demonstration of the dangers of sex
experience for an artist. We felt ourselves brought to a climax when
Eugene was going to be shipwrecked on the rocks of eroticism. What was
he going to do between sheer lust and “genius”? The conflict promised
to be truly dramatic and instructive morally and psychologically.
Hurstwood in “Sister Carrie” had fallen into a similar pitfall and
shown Eugene the way to perdition. But no, Eugene does not go to the
dogs. Dreiser is too indifferent to dramatization and too honest an
artist to bring his books to such a climax. “The Genius” is not a
sermon. Eugene recovers and we find him at the dénouement reading
Herbert Spencer and Christian Science in the company of his daughter.
How could the American Comstocks find fault with such a moral and
happy ending, and how could they miss the epical lesson of the book,
as literally emphasized by the author himself? Eugene Witla made a
mistake, we are told, when he failed to see the danger which eroticism
caused his “genius.” Love-making may be a spiritual incentive for an
artist but it can paralyze his physical energies:
He did not realize ... that he was, aside from his art, living a
life which might rob talent of its finest flavor, discolor the
aspect of the world for himself, take scope from imagination and
hamper effort with nervous irritation, and make accomplishment
impossible. He had no knowledge of the effect of one’s sexual
life upon one’s work, nor what such a life, when badly arranged,
can do to a perfect art--how it can distort the sense of color,
weaken that balanced judgment of character which is so essential
to a normal interpretation of life, make all striving hopeless,
take from art its most joyous conception, make life itself seem
unimportant and death a relief.
This sounds like rather commonplace ethics and not worth a thousand
pages of demonstration, but it constitutes on the part of the author a
formal moral commitment. It must again be quoted to show that Theodore
Dreiser is much less amoral than he seems to be. The fact that he
failed once more in dramatizing his point is due to a flaw in his
philosophy. The doctrine of the _inevitable equation_ is, so to speak,
anti-catastrophic, and certainly it is anti-dramatic. Where there is
no place for conscience, remorse and conversion, there is no place for
climax and anticlimax, and consequently none for the drama. Dreiser’s
philosophy of positivism is responsible for this lack of dynamism which
mars his books. His art, like his point of view, can only be strictly
static. Hence the tediousness of his novels and particularly that of
“The Genius.”
* * * * *
This again largely accounts for the qualities and the defects of “An
American Tragedy,” Dreiser’s latest novel. The title of the book
remains enigmatic,--or is it too obvious? What has America to do with
Clyde Griffiths’ murder, and if it has, why not denounce it more
specifically? This last novel is the story of a crime and a criminal
strung out into two volumes. It was not the first contribution of the
author to criminology. The problem of crime had already been on his
mind. He dealt with it in his play called “The Hand of the Potter.”
Crime, we might well say, constitutes an integral part of Dreiser’s
metaphysics. It occurs as a natural episode in the history of the
individual man asserting his will against society. The truth of the
aphorism that “might is right” cannot be proved without it. Crime and
the repressions which accompany it are the fatal results of the revolt
of temperament against its environment. After what we know of Dreiser’s
bio-chemical convictions, we may easily foresee that his philosophy
of crime and the criminal will give no part to responsibility. The
criminal, like the buccaneer of finance, of the “genius,” will be
a machine set in motion by blind and irresistible laws. Dreiser’s
determinism eliminates free will and along with it the criminal
himself. For this reason we must not expect the pathetic appeals
to conscience from him which are found in Victor Hugo, Dostoievski
and Tolstoi. Crime, according to Dreiser, has nothing to do with
conscience, since conscience does not exist, but it may have something
to do with science. In his ethical system there is no room for pity,
expiation and remorse. The days of “The Scarlet Letter” are gone. In
the light of bio-chemistry a criminal has no more or less importance
than a rattlesnake, a shark or the microbe of cancer. This determinism
in regard to crime was arraigned forty years ago in M. Paul Bourget’s
“The Disciple,” and it was cynically illustrated by Julien Sorel in
Stendhal’s “Le rouge et le noir.” Clyde Griffiths, like Robert Greslou
in “The Disciple,” has placed himself beyond evil and good. Let us hear
from Theodore Dreiser himself the story of Clyde Griffiths. It will
save many readers the trouble of plodding tediously along in the morass
of the most instructive and also the most monotonous book ever written
by the novelist.
Clyde Griffiths is the son of more or less abnormal parents. His
father and mother are religious fanatics. Clyde is ambitious and
dreams of a bright future. He begins as a bell boy of a hotel in
Kansas City. An uncle of his, a wealthy manufacturer, gives him a
start. He falls in love with the girl Roberta. He has a bio-chemical
idyll with her. Just at the moment that she becomes pregnant he finds
a new and more promising affinity in the person of a rich heiress.
The world is his if he marries her. But there is Roberta and her
trouble. What will Griffiths do with her? He deliberately plans to
get rid of her. He takes her to a pond and drowns her. He is caught,
tried, convicted and sent to the electric chair. _The Inevitable
Equation_ acts as mathematically and objectively in his case as a
guillotine. Bio-chemical predestination leaves no hope from the start.
The presentation of the case, the climax, the anticlimax, and the
_dénouement_ follow each other as the conclusions of a theorem. Nothing
is left to chance, providence or imagination. Griffiths acts thus and
thus, he wants this and this, and he gets what he deserves.
Dreiser’s matter-of-fact method of reporting helped him to indict Clyde
Griffiths as only an expert criminal lawyer could do it. His technique
in the presentation of the case is perfect. It makes us wonder if he
did not miss his vocation when he bartered the bar for the writing
desk of a novelist. But the psychology of the book is still more
interesting than its knowledge of the code. “An American Tragedy” is a
most original attempt to detect the instillation of a criminal thought
into a man’s brain. Did anybody ever give a more exact, penetrating
and dramatic account of how the idea of crime can invade a mind and
gradually anesthetize the whole moral system of the criminal? Dreiser
shows himself an expert and an explorer of the field of abnormal
psychology by the way he marshals what may be called instinctive
logics, the logics of our blood and flesh, against rational logic, and
by the way he detects the obscure sophistications of the inhibited and
repressed, to find motives which come to their selfish ends. Freud and
the psychoanalysts are beaten at their own game. The scenes of the
book which show us the plan of the crime brewing in Clyde Griffiths’
mind are tantamount to magic divination. Those pages on the function
of the will must be recommended to professional psychologists and
criminologists. If Dreiser’s views on the subject were accepted, our
whole system of criminal legislation ought to be amended.
The criminal for Dreiser is like God for Renan. He is not in the
_esse_ but in the _fieri_. He is not a fact but only a possibility.
Crime for Dreiser is something which cannot be indicted because it
cannot be weighed. The allegory of Justice as a figure bearing a
pair of scales is a lie. To define better, Dreiser dissociates. His
unflinching analysis leaves very little room for fully deliberate
intention on the part of the criminal. According to this new diagnostic
of the criminal mind, a criminal thought operates like a microbe and
it follows an homeopathic process. It never becomes obvious, clear or
exclusive enough to allow the use of the word “responsibility” in its
current acceptance. Responsibility for a crime supposes a conception
of the human mind and will which bio-chemistry contradicts. Such is
Theodore Dreiser’s attitude in regard to the problem of crime. It is
no longer for him, as it was for Hawthorne, a question of conscience
but of nerves; not a problem of psychology but of physiology. He gave a
most dramatic support to these views in several scenes of “An American
Tragedy,” and in particular in the scene of Roberta’s drowning. Was
the drowning the result of premeditation on the part of Griffiths, or
was it not purely accidental? Who can tell? His conduct as a criminal
is a series of gropings through the dark, of hesitations, of advance
and retreat in the half-voluntary direction of an act in way of
accomplishment, without much self-control and still less deliberate
intention. Griffiths lives in a kind of pathological _aura_ which
dulls and poisons one by one his mental powers. There is enough of
this to puzzle jury and judge. Remember, for instance, the episode
when Clyde sits in the boat with Roberta. We had the impression that
he had foreseen everything, and yet, when the time comes to act, his
will power deserts him. The tragedy, none the less, develops itself
automatically, as if he were out of it, were not concerned with it. The
boat capsizes. Roberta’s head is hit by Griffiths’ camera. She falls
into the water and he does not make a move to save her. He is arrested,
tried and condemned. All this happens as automatically as the firing of
a Winchester rifle.
Again in the case of “An American Tragedy” as in that of his other
novels, it would be unfair to take Theodore Dreiser for a cynic.
There is a lesson between the lines if we know how to read it. What
proportion is there between man’s deeds and his judgments? What is
there in common between the dark and mysterious moves of our minds
and the clumsy machinery devised to indict and to punish? Detectives,
judges, lawyers, laws, jails and executioners. Does not the living
mind of a criminal make light of all this, and if so, how can he be
sentenced and electrocuted? I consider the scene at the end of the
book between Clyde Griffiths, the murderer, and Reverend McMillan,
his confessor, as one of the most dramatic in American literature. The
priest has called upon the murderer and he wants him to make “a clean
breast.” Much to his amazement he finds himself confronted with doubts.
Here is this scene worthy of Dostoievski:
The Reverend McMillan, hearing all this--and never in his life
before having heard or having had passed to him so intricate and
elusive and strange a problem--and because of Clyde’s faith in
and regard for him, was enormously impressed. And now sitting
before him quite still and pondering most deeply, sadly and even
nervously--so serious and important was this request for an
opinion--something which, as he knew, Clyde was counting on to give
him earthly and spiritual peace. But, none-the-less, the Reverend
McMillan was himself too puzzled to answer so quickly.
“Up to the time you went in that boat with her, Clyde, you had not
changed in your mood toward her--your intention to--to ...”
The Reverend McMillan’s face was gray and drawn. His eyes were
sad. He had been listening, as he now felt, to a sad and terrible
story--an evil and cruel self-torturing and destroying story. This
young boy--really...! His hot, restless heart which plainly for
the lack of so many things which he, the Reverend McMillan, had
never wanted for, had rebelled. And because of that rebellion had
sinned mortally and was condemned to die. Indeed his reason was as
intensely troubled as his heart was moved.
“No, I had not.”
“You were, as you say, angry with yourself for being so weak as not
to be able to do what you had planned to do.”
“In a way it was like that, yes. But then I was sorry too, you see.
And maybe afraid. I’m not exactly sure now. Maybe not, either.”
The Reverend McMillan shook his head. So strange! So evasive! So
evil! and yet ...
“But at the same time, as you say, you were angry with her for
having driven you to that point.”
“Yes.”
“Where you were compelled to wrestle with so terrible a problem?”
“Yes.”
“Tst! Tst! Tst! And so you thought of striking her.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But you could not.”
“No.”
“Praised be the mercy of God. Yet in the blow that you did
strike--unintentionally, as you say--there was still some anger
against her. That was why the blow was so--so severe. You did not
want her to come near you.”
“No, I didn’t. I think I didn’t, anyhow. I am not quite sure.
It may be that I wasn’t quite right. Anyhow--all worked up, I
guess--sick almost. I--I ...” In his uniform--his hair cropped so
close, Clyde sat there, trying honestly now to think how it really
was (exactly) and greatly troubled by his inability to demonstrate
to himself even--either his guilt or his lack of guilt. Was he--or
was he not? And the Reverend McMillan--himself intensely strained,
muttering: “Wide is the gate and broad the way that leadeth to
destruction.” And yet finally adding: “But you did rise to save
her.”
“Yes, afterwards, I got up. I meant to catch her after she fell
back. That was what upset the boat.”
“And you did really want to catch her?”
“I don’t know. At the moment I guess I did. Anyhow I felt sorry, I
think.”
“But can you say now truly and positively, as your Creator sees
you, that you were sorry--or that you wanted to save her then?”
“It all happened so quick, you see,” began Clyde
nervously--hopelessly, almost, “that I’m not just sure. No, I
don’t know that I was so sorry. No. I really don’t know, you see,
now. Sometimes I think maybe I was, a little, sometimes not,
maybe. But after she was gone and I was on shore, I felt sorry--a
little. But I was sort of glad, too, you know, to be free, and yet
frightened, too ... You see ...”
“Yes, I know. You were going to that Miss X. But out there, when
she was in the water...?”
“No.”
“You did not want to go to her rescue?”
“No.”
“Tst! Tst! Tst! You felt no sorrow? No shame? Then?”
“Yes, shame, maybe. Maybe sorrow, too, a little. I knew it was
terrible. I felt that it was, of course. But still--you see ...”
“Yes, I know. That Miss X. You wanted to get away.”
“Yes--but mostly I was frightened, and I didn’t want to help her.”
“Yes! Yes! Tst! Tst! Tst! If she drowned you could go to that Miss
X. You thought of that?” The Reverend McMillan’s lips were tightly
and sadly compressed.
“Yes.”
“My son! My son! In your heart was murder then.”
“Yes, yes,” Clyde said reflectively. “I have thought since it must
have been that way.”
The Reverend McMillan paused and to hearten himself for this task
began to pray--but silently--and to himself: “Our Father who art
in Heaven--Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be
done--on earth as it is in Heaven.”
This admirable scene is an excellent example of Theodore Dreiser’s
realism at his best. There is enough of suffused emotion in it to make
it human and artistically impressive.
Such is the work of Theodore Dreiser as a novelist. He is harsh and
pessimistic. He takes away from us all our illusions. He makes us pay
for truth at any cost with what we hold most interesting in ordinary
fiction--sentiment, pathos, irony--but he does it in good faith. And
he is quite as often harsh, honest, painstaking, vigorous and often
mighty. Yes, his philosophy is without illusions but it is certainly
not his fault:
It is strange, but life is constantly presenting these pathetic
paradoxes--these astounding blunders which temperament and blood
moods bring about and reason and circumstance and convention
condemn. The dreams of man are one thing--his capacity to realize
them another. At either pole are the accidents of supreme failure
and supreme success--the supreme failure of Abelard for instance,
the supreme success of a Napoleon, enthroned at Paris. But, oh, the
endless failures for one success.
Balzac at least, in the preface to his “Comédie humaine,” did not
completely despair of man. Was he good or bad, he surely did not know,
but he ushered in the priest and the physician to make him better, if
need be. Theodore Dreiser leaves us very little hope of the reformation
of the fallen angel. He writes:
It is a question whether the human will, of itself alone, ever has
cured or ever can cure any human weakness. Tendencies are subtle
things. They are involved in the chemistry of one’s being, and
those who delve in the mysteries of biology frequently find that
curious anomaly, a form of minute animal life--chemically and
physically attracted to its own disaster.
Then we learn, to our delight, the beautiful names of some of the
Cowperwoods, Hurstwoods, Jennie Gerhardts and Eugene Witlas of
biology. They are called the “paramecium,” “the vorticella,” “the
actinobolus” and the “halteria grandinella.”
Biological fatalism is, when all is told, the heart of Theodore
Dreiser’s philosophy and the background of his work as an artist. When
not suffused with some human appeal it opens only a blind alley to an
artist. As a philosophical creed it even tends to exclude art entirely,
because it forbids freedom. Art is the product of mind at play with
the world. Why should the artist enjoy a liberty which he denies
his characters and what is left to beauty in a blind and an absurd
universe? Let us sum up Dreiser’s decalogue:
1. Our will cannot prevail over our temperament.
2. Instinct is the enemy of reason.
3. The law of our instincts is diametrically opposed to the social
code.
4. It is through his instincts that man is most completely and most
dangerously what he really is.
5. Once given a temperament it can never be changed. There is no
moral progress, no conversion possible from evil to good.
6. Biology controls our body and contradicts social ethics.
7. Consequently our social organization, ethics, politics (and
why not the whole of our civilization?) are biologically and
chemically false.
8. All principles and institutions which ignore bio-chemical man
and which are not deeply rooted in instincts and physiological
necessities are false.
_Also spake Zarathustra!_ Auguste Comte, before Dreiser, had given
biology as a required foundation of social ethics but he finally
felt the necessity to build a moral and religious roof upon the
house. All the hounds of materialism and romanticism unleashed can
be heard howling in the decalogue of Dreiser. Rousseau before him,
with Helvetius and _tutti quanti_ among the eighteenth-century
encyclopedists, had raised before him the law of nature against the law
of the mind. The result, as Thomas Carlyle proved, was the guillotine
and Armageddon. Are we going to deny all the efforts of the saints,
the ascetics, the heroes, the philosophers, the artists, to undo the
patient and painful and slow uprising of mankind out of the primitive
slime, to save Clyde Griffiths from the electric chair and restore the
Dinoceras? Society may be wrong in forcing golf upon mankind for a
substitute to the _vie dangereuse_ or in finding a reservation for the
Apaches in prison, but who will seriously complain? Let us bless the
good Providence who gave us a chance to learn football and baseball as
a catharsis to soothe and purge our temperament. To follow Dreiser’s
ethics would be very much like courting cosmic suicide, and let us
wish that the rattlesnake and the shark will last not as a rule but as
exceptions among us, so that we ourselves may also have a chance to
express our temperament and a chance to survive. All of us can safely
enjoy the sight of wild beasts at the zoo or in the “movies.”
It is hardly necessary to point to the difference between Dreiser’s
morals and those of the Puritans. Puritan ethics, like all ethics,
rested upon the preference given to the social over the individual
motives of action. It opposed social and moral man to instinctive
man and it destroyed the Indian because he was too elementary and
bio-chemical. It brought about moral improvement by a system of
restraints, as all Christian, Buddhist and even pagan ethics have done.
One may well criticize the results of those experiments without wishing
to annihilate the whole edifice at one stroke. It seems as unscientific
to give everything to instinct as to deny it all. Is not art, in
defect of religion, the ideal means to harmonize body and mind, the
physical and the spiritual? Art shows a way out of chaos; it dispels
the nightmare of Dreiser’s primitive world. Greed and lust are not yet,
thank God! the only incentives left to man to give a meaning to life.
There certainly exists something better, somewhere.
And yet, comparing Dreiser’s pessimistic portraits of man as he is
realistically to the “most smiling aspects of life” in, let us say,
William Dean Howells, one cannot help finding them at least virile.
Truth above all! And let us have all the truth. Remember the saying
of Pascal that _qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête_. Dreiser’s
dissociations have at least the courage of truth. He wanted to defy
the sentimentalists and restore the carnal man in his rights. As a
hero or as a victim? This is not easy to say. Where Eugene Witla and
Clyde Griffiths flounder, Frank Cowperwood almost succeeds. Dreiser’s
objectivity leaves us in the lurch concerning moral issues. There are
still many among us who prefer life among the mid-Victorians to that
among the plesiosauri. Dreiser’s challenge to our vital lies is too
one-sided. He is not mid-Victorian enough. He atones for Howells’
sentimentalism and at the same time makes us long for the Kentons and
the Laphams. Call it cowardice, if you want, or call it art. Such a
starvation of the best human emotions is dangerous for an artist who
wants to force a lesson upon his readers. It would indeed prove a
mighty stroke of the cosmic irony if the realistic novels of such an
honest seeker after truth as Theodore Dreiser served only to win the
reader to the side of the sentimental writers.