Chapter IV: 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_.