5. THEODORE DREISER
Much concerned about wisdom as Theodore Dreiser is, he almost wholly lacks the dexterous knowingness which has marked the mass of fiction in the age of O. Henry. Not only has Mr. Dreiser never allowed any one else to make up his mind for him regarding the significance and aims and obligations of mankind but he has never made up his mind himself. A large dubitancy colors all his reflections. "All we know is that we cannot know." The only law about which we can be reasonably certain is the law of change. Justice is "an occasional compromise struck in an eternal battle." Virtue and honesty are "a system of weights and measures, balances struck between man and man."
Prudence no less than philosophy demands, then, that we hold ourselves constantly in readiness to discard our ancient creeds and habits and step valiantly around the corner beyond which reality will have drifted even while we were building our houses on what seemed the primeval and eternal rock. Tides of change rise from deeps below deeps; cosmic winds of change blow upon us from boundless chaos; mountains, in the long geologic seasons, shift and flow like clouds; and the everlasting heavens may some day be shattered by the explosion or pressure of new circumstances. Somewhere in the scheme man stands punily on what may be an Ararat rising out of the abyss or only a promontory of the moment sinking back again; there all his strength is devoted to a dim struggle for survival. How in this flickering universe shall man claim for himself the honors of any important antiquity or any important destiny? What, in this vast accident, does human dignity amount to?
For a philosopher with views so wide it is difficult to be a dramatist or a novelist. If he is consistent the most portentous human tragedy must seem to him only a tiny gasp for breath, the most delightful human comedy only a tiny flutter of joy. Against a background of suns dying on the other side of Aldebaran any mole trodden upon by some casual hoof may appear as significant a personage as an Oedipus or a Lear in his last agony. To be a novelist or dramatist at all such a cosmic philosopher must contract his vision to the little island we inhabit, must adjust his interest to mortal proportions and concerns, must match his narrative to the scale by which we ordinarily measure our lives. The muddle of elements so often obvious in Mr. Dreiser's work comes from the conflict within him of huge, expansive moods and a conscience working hard to be accurate in its representation of the most honest facts of manners and character.
Granted, he might reasonably argue, that the plight and stature of all mankind are essentially so mean, the novelist need not seriously bother himself with the task of looking about for its heroic figures. Plain stories of plain people are as valuable as any others. Since all larger doctrines and ideals are likely to be false in a precarious world, it is best to stick as close as possible to the individual. When the individual is sincere he has at least some positive attributes; his record may have a genuine significance for others if it is presented with absolute candor. Indeed, we can partially escape from the general meaninglessness of life at large by being or studying individuals who are sincere, and who are therefore the origins and centers of some kind of reality.
That the sincerity which Mr. Dreiser practises differs in some respects from that of any other American novelist, no matter how truthful, must be referred to one special quality of his own temperament. Historically he has his fellows: he belongs with the movement toward naturalism which came to America when Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, partly as a protest against the bland realism which Howells expounded, were dissenting in their various dialects from the reticences and the romances then current. Personally Mr. Dreiser displays, almost alone among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a better native term we have to call the peasant type—the type to which Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to.
Enlarged by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all manner of novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by the rigor of village habits and prejudices—still he carries wherever he goes the true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity. How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short story When the Old Century Was New, an attempt to reconstruct in fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes A Traveler at Forty so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr. Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier American realists has about it some look of conscious intention, and is undoubtedly sustained by his literary principles, yet his candor essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt terms before he speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even upon the more subtle and intricate themes—finance and sex and art—which interest him above all others.
On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance. The career of Cowperwood in The Financier and The Titan, a career notoriously based upon that of Charles T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise his virtue of patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues generally to convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood's business enterprises. The American financier, after all, has rarely had much subtlety in his make-up. Single-minded, tough-skinned, ruthless, "suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and the like are invented," he shoulders and hurls his bulk through a sea of troubles and carries off his spoils. Such a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. Dreiser understands. He understands the march of desire to its goal. He seems always to have been curious regarding the large operations of finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the intoxication of golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in The Jew of Malta, and on his cynical side struck by the mechanism of craft and courage and indomitable impulse which the financier employs. Mr. Dreiser writes, it is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the naïve hand of a peasant—even though a peasant of genius—wondering how great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at the mystery. And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all sure of the prize. As it is, this Trilogy of Desire (never completed in the third part which was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray into London) is as considerable an epic as American business has yet to show.
Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous as those of the leader of some four-footed herd. In this respect the novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, both of them annals of women who fall as easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand of the conquering male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover. No moralism overlays the biology of these novels. Sex in them is a free-flowing, expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually at war with the rules and taboos which have been devised by mankind to hold its amative impulses within convenient bounds. To the cosmic philosopher what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate moment?
Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods of sex. At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its vagrant hours. For this his favorite situation is in large part responsible: that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and immediately compliant to his advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth—an obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits. What he most conspicuously leaves out of account is the will and personality of women, whom he sees, or at least represents, with hardly any exceptions as mere fools of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no separate identities till some lover shapes them. To something like this simplicity the rôle of women in love is reduced by those Boccaccian fabulists who adorn the village taproom and the corner grocery.
Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider The 'Genius', a massive, muddy, powerful narrative, his greatest novel, though as a matter of fact it cannot be compared with Sister Carrie for insight or accuracy or charm. His partiality may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination toward the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero and half picaro. Witla remains mediocre enough in all but his sexual unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving force more or less like those forces which impel Cowperwood. The will to wealth, the will to love, the will to art—Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind energies with no goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit. Particularly is this true of his representation of the careers of artists. Carrie becomes a noted actress in a few short weeks; Witla almost as rapidly becomes a noted illustrator; other minor characters here and there in the novels are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it. Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing analysis of the mysterious behavior of true genius. Mr. Dreiser's artists are hardly persons at all; they are creatures driven, and the wonder lies primarily in the impelling energy. The cosmic philosopher in him sees the beginning and the end of the artistic process better than the novelist in him sees its methods. And the peasant in him, though it knows the world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investigated that world at first hand, still leads him to report it in terms often quaint, melodramatic, invincibly rural. Witness the hundreds of times he calls things "artistic."
Two of his latest books indicate the range of his gifts and his excellences. In Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, which he calls A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, he undertook to expound his general philosophy and produced the most negligible of all his works. He has no faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he begins to reason he is less than half himself. In Twelve Men, on the other hand, he displays the qualities by virtue of which he attracts and deserves a serious attention. Rarely generalizing, he portrays a dozen actual persons he has known, all his honesty brought to the task of making his account fit the reality exactly, and all his large tolerance exercised to present the truth without malice or excuses. Here lies the field of his finest victories, here and in those adjacent tracts of other books which are nearest this simple method: his representation of old Gerhardt and of Aaron Berchansky in The Hand of the Potter; numerous sketches of character in that broad pageant A Hoosier Holiday; the tenderly conceived record of Caroline Meeber, wispy and witless as she often is; the masterly study of Hurstwood's deterioration in Sister Carrie—this last the peak among all Mr. Dreiser's successes.
Not the incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merciless verbosity nor his too frequent interposition of crude argument can destroy the effect which he produces at his best—that of an eminent spirit brooding over a world which in spite of many condemnations he deeply, somberly loves. Something peasant-like in his genius may blind him a little to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling the plain truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, as much as he loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls over which he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are, he has come to them from long flights, and has brought back a lifted vision which enriches his drab narratives. Something spacious, something now lurid now luminous, surrounds them. From somewhere sound accents of an authority not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a thinker of the widest views to contract himself to the dimensions needed for naturalistic art, and though he may often fail when he attempts it, when he does succeed he has the opportunity, which the mere worldling lacks, of ennobling his art with some of the great light of the poets.