Theodore Dreiser
John Cowper Powys
In estimating the intrinsic value of a book like The “Genius” and—generally—of a writer like Theodore Dreiser, it is advisable to indulge in a little gentle introspection.
Criticism need not always impose itself as an art; but it must at least conform to some of the principles that govern that form of human activity. The worthlessness of so much energetic modern criticism is that it proceeds—like scum—from the mere surface of the writer’s intelligence. It is true that all criticism resolves itself ultimately into a matter of taste;—but one has to discover what one’s taste really is; and that is not always easy.
Taste is a living thing, an organic thing. It submits to the laws of growth; and its growth is fostered or retarded by many extraneous influences. In regard to the appreciation of new and original works of art, it belongs to the inherent nature of taste that it should be enlarged, transmuted, and undergo the birth-pangs of a species of re-creation. In the presence of a work of art that is really unusual, in an attempt to appreciate a literary effect that has never appeared before, one’s taste necessarily suffers a certain embarrassment and uneasiness. It suffers indeed sometimes a quite extreme discomfort. This is inevitable. This is right. This means that the creative energy in the new thing is getting to work upon us, unloosening our prejudices and enlarging our scope. Such a process is attended by exquisite intellectual excitement. It is also attended by a certain rending and tearing of personal vanity.
One is too apt to confuse the existing synthesis of one’s aesthetic instincts with the totality of one’s being; and this is a fatal blunder; for who can fathom the reach of that circumference? And it is of the nature of all syntheses to change and grow.
Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more ridiculous and ineffective than the kind of hand-to-mouth criticism which attempts to eliminate its own past, and to snatch at the glow and glamour of a work of art, as it were “de vacuo,” and out of misty clouds. If one wishes to catch the secret of true criticism; if one’s criticism is to be something more than a mere howl of senseless condemnation or yawp of still more senseless praise; one must attempt to do what Goethe and Saint-Beuve and Brandes and Pater were always doing: that is to say, to make every use of every tradition, our own, as well as that of classical authority;—and then carry all this a little, just a little, further; giving it the shudder and the thrilling interest of the process of organic growth.
Without tradition, the tradition of our own determined taste and the tradition of classical taste, there can be no growth. Oracles uttered in neglect of these, are oracles “in vacuo,” without meaning or substance; without roots in human experience. Whether we are pleased to acknowledge it or not, our own gradually-evolved taste is linked at a thousand points with the classical taste of the ages. In criticizing new work we can no more afford to neglect such tradition than, in expressing our thoughts, we can afford to neglect language.
Tradition is the language of criticism. It can be carried further: every original work of art, by producing a new reaction upon it, necessarily carries it further. But it cannot be swept aside; or we are reduced to dumbness; to such vague growls and gestures as animals might indulge in. Criticism, to carry any intelligible meaning at all, must use the language provided by the centuries. There is no other language to use; and in default of language we are reduced, as I have said, to inarticulate noises.
The unfortunate thing is, that much of the so-called “criticism” of our day is nothing better than such physiological gesticulation. In criticism, as in life, a certain degree of continuity is necessary, or we become no more than arbitrary puffs of wind, who may shriek one day down the chimney, and another day through a crack in the door, but in neither case with any intelligible meaning for human ears.
In dealing with a creative quality as unusual and striking as that of Theodore Dreiser, it is of absolutely no critical value to content ourselves with a crude physical disturbance on the surface of our minds, whether such disturbance is favourable or unfavourable to the writer. It is, for instance, quite irrelevant to hurl condemnation upon a work like The “Genius” because it is largely preoccupied with sex. It is quite equally irrelevant to lavish enthusiastic laudations upon it because of this preoccupation. A work of art is not good because it speaks daringly and openly about things that shock certain minds. It is not bad because it avoids all mention of such things. An artist has a right to introduce into his work what he pleases and to exclude from his work what he pleases. The question for the critic is, not what subject has he selected, but how has he treated that subject;—has he made out of it an imaginative, suggestive, and convincing work of art, or has he not! There is no other issue before the critic than this; and if he supposes there is,—if he supposes he has the smallest authority to dictate to a writer what his subject shall be;—he is simply making a fool of himself.
There is an absurd tendency among some of us to suppose that a writer is necessarily a great writer because he is daring in his treatment of sex. This is quite as grotesque an illusion as the opposite one, that a great writer must be idealistic and uplifting. There is not the remotest reason why he should concern himself with sex; if he prefers—as did Charles Dickens for instance—to deal with other aspects of life. On the other hand there is not the least reason why he should be “uplifting.” Let him be an artist—an artist—that is the important matter! All these questions concerning “subjects” are tedious and utterly trifling.
In The “Genius” Theodore Dreiser has achieved a very curious and a very original work. In doing it he has once more made it clear how much more interesting the quality of his own genius is than that of any other American novelist of the present age.
The “Genius” is an epic work. It has the epic rather than the dramatic quality; it has the epic rather than the mystic, or symbolic, quality. And strictly speaking, Dreiser’s novels, especially the later ones, are the only novels in America, are the only novels, as a matter of fact, in England or America, which possess this quality. It is quite properly in accordance with the epic attitude of mind, with the epic quality in art, this reduction of the more purely human episodes to a proportionate insignificance compared with the general surge and volume of the life-stream. It is completely in keeping with the epic quality that there should be no far-fetched psychology, no quivering suspensions on the verge of the unknown.
Dreiser is concerned with the mass and weight of the stupendous life-tide; the life-tide as it flows forward, through vast panoramic stretches of cosmic scenery. Both in respect to human beings, and in respect to his treatment of inanimate objects, this is always what most dominatingly interests him. You will not find in Dreiser’s books those fascinating arrests of the onward-sweeping tide, those delicate pauses and expectancies, in back-waters and enclosed gardens, where persons, with diverting twists in their brains, murmur and meander at their ease, protected from the great stream. Nobody in the Dreiser-world is so protected; nobody is so privileged. The great stream sweeps them all forward, sweeps them all away; and not they, but It, must be regarded as the hero of the tale.
It is precisely this quality, this subordination of the individual to the deep waters that carry him, which makes Dreiser so peculiarly the American writer. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he has had a more profoundly appreciative hearing in England than in the United States. It was so with Walt Whitman in his earlier days. To get the adequate perspective for a work so entirely epical it seems necessary to have the Atlantic as a modifying foreground. Americans—so entirely in it themselves—are naturally, unless they possess the Protean faculty of the editor of Reedy’s Mirror, unable to see the thing in this cosmic light. They are misled by certain outstanding details—the sexual scenes, for instance; or the financial scenes,—and are prevented by these, as by the famous “Catalogues” in Whitman, from getting the proportionate vision.
The true literary descendants of the author of the Leaves of Grass are undoubtedly Theodore Dreiser and Edgar Masters. These two, and these two alone, though in completely different ways, possess that singular “beyond-good-and-evil” touch which the epic form of art requires. It was just the same with Homer and Vergil, who were as naturally the epic children of aristocratic ages, as these are of a democratic one.
Achilles is not really a very attractive figure—take him all in all; and we remember how scandalously Æneas behaved to Dido. The ancient epic writers, writing for an aristocracy, caught the world-stream from a poetic angle. The modern epic writers, writing for a democracy, catch it from a realistic one. But it is the same world-stream; and in accordance with the epic vision there is the same subordination of the individual to the cosmic tide. This is essentially a dramatic, rather than an epic epoch, and that is why so many of us are bewildered and confused by the Dreiser method.
The “Genius” is a long book. But it might have been three times as long. It might begin anywhere and stop anywhere. It is the Prose-Iliad of the American Scene; and, like that other, it has a right to cut out its segment of the shifting panorama at almost any point.
And so with the style of the thing. It is a ridiculous mis-statement for critics to say that Dreiser has no style. It is a charming irony, on his own part, to belittle his style. He has, as a matter of fact, a very definite and a very effective style. It is a style that lends itself to the huge indifferent piling up of indiscriminate materials, quite as admirably as that gracious poetical one of the old epic-makers lent itself to their haughtier and more aristocratic purpose. One would recognize a page of Dreiser’s writings as infallibly as one would recognize a page of Hardy’s. The former relaxes his medium to the extreme limit and the latter tightens his; but they both have their “manner.” A paragraph written by Dreiser would never be mistaken for anyone else’s. If for no other peculiarity Dreiser’s style is remarkable for the shamelessness with which it adapts itself to the drivel of ordinary conversation. In the Dreiser books—especially in the later ones, where in my humble opinion he is feeling more firmly after his true way,—people are permitted to say those things which they actually do say in real life—things that make you blush and howl, so soaked in banality and ineptitude are they. In the true epic manner Dreiser gravely puts down all these fatuous observations, until you feel inclined to cry aloud for the maddest, the most fantastic, the most affected Osconian wit, to serve as an antidote.
But one knows very well he is right. People don’t in ordinary life—certainly not in ordinary democratic life—talk like Oscar Wilde, or utter deep ironic sayings in the style of Matthew Arnold. They don’t really—let this be well understood—concentrate their feelings in bitter pungent spasmodic outbursts, as those Rabelaisean persons in Guy de Maupassant. They just gabble and gibber and drivel; at least that is what they do in England and America. The extraordinary language which the lovers in Dreiser—we use the term “lovers” in large sense—use to one another might well make an aesthetic-minded person howl with nervous rage. But then,—and who does not know it?—the obsession of the sex-illusion is above everything else a thing that makes idiots of people; a thing that makes them talk like Simple Simons. In real life lovers don’t utter those wonderful pregnant sayings which leap to their lips in our subtle symbolic dramas. They just burble and blather and blurt forth whatever drivelling nonsense comes into their heads. Dreiser is the true master of the modern American Prose-Epic just because he is not afraid of the weariness, the staleness, the flatness, and unprofitableness of actual human conversation. In reading the great ancient poetic epics one is amazed at the “naivete” with which these haughty persons—these gods and demi-gods express their emotional reactions. It is “carried off,” of course, there, by the sublime heightening of the style; but it produces just the same final impression,—of the insignificance of the individual, whether mortal or immortal, compared with the torrent of Fate which sweeps them all along.
And the same thing applies to Dreiser’s attitude towards “good and evil” and towards the problem of the “supernatural.” All other modern writers array themselves on this side or that. They either defend traditional morality or they attack it. They are anxious, at all costs, to give their work dramatic intensity; they struggle to make it ironical, symbolical, mystical—God knows what! But Dreiser neither attacks morality nor defends immorality. In the true Epic manner he puts himself aside, and permits the great mad Hurly-Burly to rush pell-mell past him and write its own whirligig runes at its own careless pleasure. Even Zola himself was not such a realist. Zola had a purpose;—the purpose of showing what a Beast the human animal is! Dreiser’s people are not beasts; and they shock our aesthetic sensibilities quite as often by their human sentiment as they do by their lapses into lechery.
To a European mind there is something incredibly absurd in the notion that these Dreiser books are immoral.
Unlike the majority of French and Russian writers Dreiser is not interested in the pathology of vice. He is too deeply imbued with the great naive epic spirit to stop and linger in these curious bye-paths. He holds Nature—in her normal moods—to be sufficiently remarkable.
It is the same with his attitude towards the “supernatural.” The American Prose-Epic were obviously false to reality if the presence of the supernatural were not felt. It is felt and felt very powerfully; but it is kept in its place. Like Walt Whitman’s stellar constellations, it suffices for those who belong to it, it is right enough where it is—we do not want it any nearer!
Because the much-tossed wanderer, Eugene Witla, draws a certain consolation, at the last, from Christian Science, only a very literal person would accuse the author of The “Genius” of being a convert to the faith. To omit Christian Science from any prose-epic of American life would be to falsify the picture out of personal prejudice. Dreiser has no prejudices except the prejudice of finding the normal man and the normal woman, shuffled to and fro by the normal forces of life, an interesting and arresting spectacle. To some among us such a spectacle is not interesting. We must have the excitement of the unusual, the shock of the abnormal. Well! There are plenty of European writers ready to gratify this taste. Dreiser is not a European writer. He is an American writer. The life that interests him, and interests him passionately, is the life of America. It remains to be seen whether the life of America interests Americans!
It is really quite important to get the correct point of view with regard to Dreiser’s “style.” The negative qualities in this style of his are indeed as important as the positive ones. He is so epical, so objective, so concrete and indifferent, that he is quite content when the great blocked-out masses of his work lift themselves from the obscure womb of being and take shape before him. When they have done this,—when these piled-up materials and portentous groups of people have limned themselves against the grey background,—he himself stands aside, like some dim demiurgic forger in the cosmic blast-furnace, and mutters queer commentaries upon what he sees. He utters these commentaries through the lips of his characters—Cowperwood, say, or Witla—or even some of the less important ones;—and broken and incoherent enough they are!
But what matter! The huge epic canvas is stretched out there before us. The vast cyclopean edifice lifts its shadowy bulk towards the grey sky. The thing has been achieved. The creative spirit has breathed upon the waters. Resting from his titanic labor, what matter if this Demiurge drowses, and with an immense humorous indifference permits his characters to nod too, and utter strange words in their dreams!
The carelessness of Dreiser’s style, its large indolence, its contempt for epigrammatic point, its relaxed strength, is not really a defect at all when you regard his work from the epic view-point.
There must be something in a great cosmic picture to take the place of the sand and silt and rubbish and rubble which we know so well in life, under the grey sky! And these stammered incoherences, these broken mutterings, fill in this gap. They give the picture that drab patience, that monotonous spaciousness which is required. Symbolic drama or psychological fiction can dispense with these blank surfaces. The prose-epic of America cannot afford to do without them. They suggest that curious sadness—the sadness of large, flat, featureless scenery, which visitors from Europe find so depressing.
Well! Thus it remains. If one is interested in the “urge—urge—urge,” as Whitman calls it, of the normal life-stream as it goes upon its way, in these American States, one reads Dreiser with a strange pleasure. He is no more moral than the normal life-stream is moral; and he is no more immoral. It is true the normal life-stream does not cover quite the whole field. There are back-waters and there are enclosed gardens.
There was a Europe once. But the American prose-epic is the American prose-epic.
“So We Grew Together”[1]
Edgar Lee Masters
Reading over your letters I find you wrote me
“My dear boy,” or at times “dear boy,” and the envelope
Said “master”—all as I had been your very son,
And not the orphan whom you adopted.
Well, you were father to me! And I can recall
The things you did for me or gave me:
One time we rode in a box-car to Springfield
To see the greatest show on earth;
And one time you gave me red-top boots,
And one time a watch, and one time a gun.
Well, I grew to gawkiness with a voice
Like a rooster trying to crow in August
Hatched in April, we’ll say.
And you went about wrapped up in silence
With eyes aflame, and I heard little rumors
Of what they were doing to you, and how
They wronged you—and we were poor—so poor!
And I could not understand why you failed,
And why if you did good things for the people
The people did not sustain you.
And why you loved another woman than Aunt Susan,
So it was whispered at school, and what could be baser,
Or so little to be forgiven?.....
They crowded you hard in those days.
But you fought like a wounded lion
For yourself I know, but for us, for me.
At last you fell ill, and for months you tottered
Around the streets as thin as death,
Trying to earn our bread, your great eyes glowing
And the silence around you like a shawl!
But something in you kept you up.
You grew well again and rosy with cheeks
Like an Indian peach almost, and eyes
Full of moonlight and sunlight, and a voice
That sang, and a humor that warded
The arrows off. But still between us
There was reticence; you kept me away
With a glittering hardness; perhaps you thought
I kept you away—for I was moving
In spheres you knew not, living through
Beliefs you believed in no more, and ideals
That were just mirrors of unrealities.
As a boy can be I was critical of you.
And reasons for your failures began to arise
In my mind—I saw specific facts here and there
With no philosophy at hand to weld them
And synthesize them into one truth—
And a rush of the strength of youth
Deluded me into thinking the world
Was something so easily understood and managed
While I knew it not at all in truth.
And an adolescent egotism
Made me feel you did not know me
Or comprehend the all that I was.
All this you divined.......
So it went. And when I left you and passed
To the world, the city—still I see you
With eyes averted, and feel your hand
Limp with sorrow—you could not speak.
You thought of what I might be, and where
Life would take me, and how it would end—
There was longer silence. A year or two
Brought me closer to you. I saw the play now
And the game somewhat and understood your fights
And enmities, and hardnesses and silences,
And wild humor that had kept you whole—
For your soul had made it as an antitoxin
To the world’s infections. And you swung to me
Closer than before—and a chumship began
Between us......
What vital power was yours!
You never tired, or needed sleep, or had a pain,
Or refused a delight. I loved the things now
You had always loved, a winning horse,
A roulette wheel, a contest of skill
In games or sports ... long talks on the corner
With men who have lived and tell you
Things with a rich flavor of old wisdom or humor;
A woman, a glass of whisky at a table
Where the fatigue of life falls, and our reserves
That wait for happiness come up in smiles,
Laughter, gentle confidences. Here you were
A man with youth, and I a youth was a man,
Exulting in your braveries and delight in life.
How you knocked that scamp over at Harry Varnell’s
When he tried to take your chips! And how I,
Who had thought the devil in cards as a boy,
Loved to play with you now and watch you play;
And watch the subtle mathematics of your mind
Prophecy, divine the plays. Who was it
In your ancestry that you harked back to
And reproduced with such various gifts
Of flesh and spirit, Anglo-Saxon, Celt?—
You with such rapid wit and powerful skill
For catching illogic and whipping Error’s
Fangéd head from the body?.....
I was really ahead of you
At this stage, with more self-consciousness
Of what man is, and what life is at last,
And how the spirit works, and by what laws,
With what inevitable force. But still I was
Behind you in that strength which in our youth,
If ever we have it, squeezes all the nectar
From the grapes. It seemed you’d never lose
This power and sense of joy, but yet at times
I saw another phase of you......
There was the day
We rode together north of the old town,
Past the old farm houses that I knew—
Past maple groves, and fields of corn in the shock,
And fields of wheat with the fall green.
It was October, but the clouds were summer’s,
Lazily floating in a sky of June;
And a few crows flying here and there,
And a quail’s call, and around us a great silence
That held at its core old memories
Of pioneers, and dead days, forgotten things!
I’ll never forget how you looked that day. Your hair
Was turning silver now, but still your eyes
Burned as of old, and the rich olive glow
In your cheeks shone, with not a line or wrinkle!—
You seemed to me perfection—a youth, a man!
And now you talked of the world with the old wit,
And now of the soul—how such a man went down
Through folly or wrong done by him, and how
Man’s death cannot end all,
There must be life hereafter!.....
As you were that day, as you looked and spoke,
As the earth was, I hear as the soul of it all
Godard’s Dawn, Dvorák’s Humoresque,
The Morris Dances, Mendelssohn’s Barcarole,
And old Scotch songs, When the Kye Come Hame,
And The Moon Had Climbed the Highest Hill,
The Musetta Waltz and Rudolph’s Narrative;
Your great brow seemed Beethoven’s
And the lust of life in your face Cellini’s,
And your riotous fancy like Dumas.
I was nearer you now than ever before
And finding each other thus I see to-day
How the human soul seeks the human soul
And finds the one it seeks at last.
For you know you can open a window
That looks upon embowered darkness,
When the flowers sleep and the trees are still
At Midnight, and no light burns in the room;
And you can hide your butterfly
Somewhere in the room, but soon you will see
A host of butterfly mates
Fluttering through the window to join
Your butterfly hid in the room.
It is somehow thus with souls......
This day then I understood it all:
Your vital democracy and love of men
And tolerance of life; and how the excess of these
Had wrought your sorrows in the days
When we were so poor, and the small of mind
Spoke of your sins and your connivance
With sinful men. You had lived it down,
Had triumphed over them, and you had grown
Prosperous in the world and had passed
Into an easy mastery of life and beyond the thought
Of further conquests for things.
As the Brahmins say no more you worshipped matter,
Or scarcely ghosts, or even the gods
With singleness of heart.
This day you worshipped Eternal Peace
Or Eternal Flame, with scarce a laugh or jest
To hide your worship; and I understood,
Seeing so many facets to you, why it was
Blind Condon always smiled to hear your voice,
And why it was in a green-room years ago
Booth turned to you, marking your face
From all the rest, and said “There is a man
Who might play Hamlet—better still Othello”;
And why it was the women loved you; and the priest
Could feed his body and soul together drinking
A glass of beer and visiting with you......
Then something happened:
Your face grew smaller, your brow more narrow,
Dull fires burned in your eyes,
Your body shriveled, you walked with a cynical shuffle,
Your hands mixed the keys of life,
You had become a discord.
A monstrous hatred consumed you—
You had suffered the greatest wrong of all,
I knew and granted the wrong.
You had mounted up to sixty years, now breathing hard,
And just at the time that honor belonged to you
You were dishonored at the hands of a friend.
I wept for you, and still I wondered
If all I had grown to see in you and find in you
And love in you was just a fond illusion—
If after all I had not seen you aright as a boy:
Barbaric, hard, suspicious, cruel, redeemed
Alone by bubbling animal spirits—
Even these gone now, all of you smoke
Laden with stinging gas and lethal vapor......
Then you came forth again like the sun after storm—
The deadly uric acid driven out at last
Which had poisoned you and dwarfed your soul—
So much for soul!
The last time I saw you
Your face was full of golden light,
Something between flame and the richness of flesh.
You were yourself again, wholly yourself.
And oh, to find you again and resume
Our understanding we had worked so long to reach—
You calm and luminant and rich in thought!
This time it seemed we said but “yes” or “no”—
That was enough; we smoked together
And drank a glass of wine and watched
The leaves fall sitting on the porch.....
Then life whirled me away like a leaf,
And I went about the crowded ways of New York.
And one night Alberta and I took dinner
At a place near Fourteenth Street where the music
Was like the sun on a breeze-swept lake
When every wave is a patine of fire,
And I thought of you not at all
Looking at Alberta and watching her white teeth
Bite off bits of Italian bread,
And watching her smile and the wide pupils
Of her eyes, electrified by wine
And music and the touch of our hands
Now and then across the table.
We went to her house at last.
And through a languorous evening.
Where no light was but a single candle,
We circled about and about a pending theme
Till at last we solved it suddenly in rapture
Almost by chance; and when I left
She followed me to the hall and leaned above
The railing about the stair for the farewell kiss—
And I went into the open air ecstatically,
With the stars in the spaces of sky between
The towering buildings, and the rush
Of wheels and clang of bells,
Still with the fragrance of her lips and cheeks
And glinting hair about me, delicate
And keen in spite of the open air.
And just as I entered the brilliant car
Something said to me you are dead—
I had not thought of you, was not thinking of you.
But I knew it was true, as it was
For the telegram waited me at my room.....
I didn’t come back.
I could not bear to see the breathless breath
Over your brow—nor look at your face—
However you fared or where
To what victories soever—
Vanquished or seemingly vanquished!
[1] Copyright, 1915, by Edgar Lee Masters.
Choleric Comments
Alexander S. Kaun
Faithful are the wounds of a friend.—Proverbs, 27:6.
We were looking at oriental rugs one day, that enfant terrible, the Scavenger, and I. There were rugs that tempted me to transgress the tenth commandment, and there were rugs that jarred me as if I were listening to Carpenter’s Perambulator stunts. My fellow-flâneur became impatient with my critical remarks.
“You don’t love rugs.” His Svidrigailovian face grinned. “If you did, you would just love them, you would not quibble. Academician!”
The last epithet is used by The Little Review priests and prophets as a means to close all arguments. So it did on that occasion. But it left me pondering over the words of a New York critic who accused our magazine of being somewhat indiscriminate in its enthusiasm for the sake of enthusiasm, in its emotionalism for the sake of emotion. I recalled blushingly the confession of our chief Neo-Hellenist, who is moved aesthetically by any sort of music, whether it emanates from Kreisler’s Stradivarius or from the pianola at Henrici’s.
I confess I am a fastidious lover. The dearer a person or a thing are to me the more I demand from them, the more painfully I am hurt by their flaws. Hence the number of my dislikes exceeds that of my likes. Hence I grit my teeth at the sight of Maria Gay in Carmen. Because the music of that opera is so full of eternal symbols to me, because when listening to it I understand why Nietzsche preferred Bizet to Wagner,—I am scalded by its vulgar cabaretization. Had I not been stirred by Mr. Powys’ remarkable liturgy of St. Oscar Wilde, I would not have been so keenly pricked by his subsequent remark in his Verlaine lecture that Rimbaud was a ruffian. It is because I cannot live without music that I am compelled to suffer weekly indigestion from the sauerkraut menus furnished by Mr. Stock’s bâton. Will Mr. Scavenger of the rug-philosophy expect me not to swear and damn at the prospect of being doomed to a long season of Meistersingers, Perambulators, Goldmarckian fudge, Brahmsian Academics, Stockian Jubilee-Confetti, and similar insults? Let me touch another sore:—the Little Theatre, the Temple of Living Art, to which I have looked up with reverence and hope; the only theatrical organization in the city that seemed to have other considerations outside of box-receipts. I was present at the opening night of this season, and left the little “catacomb” with an aching heart. What reason, what artistic reason, is there to stage Andreyev’s Sabine Women anywhere outside of Russia? The play was written as a biting satire against the Russian liberals who fought against the government with Tolstoyan Non-Resistance instead of joining the revolutionary proletariat. In Andreyev’s land he is perfectly, painfully understood; but here, on Michigan Avenue, the satire degenerated into a boring burlesque! Even Raymond Johnson’s suggestive, graceful horizons fail to save the situation. As to Lithuania—what is the matter with the Little Theatre males? They move and speak like hermaphrodites, they drink vodka and swear in squeaking falsettoes, they appear so feeble and effeminate in comparison with the virile, gruesome Ellen Van Volkenburg and Miriam Kipper. Then, how realistic—shades of Zola! Maurice Browne vomits so much more realistically than Charlie Chaplin in Shanghaied....
Finding myself in the Fine Arts Building, I am in dangerous proximity of another “Temple” that invites my friendly hostility. But I vision the brandishment of the Editor’s fatal pencil—silenzia! Yet, if I must refrain from, or at least postpone, my general attack on The Little Review, let me be allowed, pray, to whip one of my confreres, the Scavenger. Whether a sound thrashing will do him good or not is doubtful; but he certainly deserves flagellation. As a denier, as a depreciator, as an anti, he is as convincing as a bulldog; but when he loves, when he lauds and affirms, his voice thins to that of a sick puppy. He should be administered cure from his mania of showering superlatives upon false gods and counterfeit prophets. I dislike the rôle of a Good Samaritan, but our Scavenger is so young, so impressionable; perhaps he will repent. Besides, I sympathize with him. He is one of those promising Americans who suffocate in their native atmosphere, or lack of atmosphere, and are easily lured and led astray by will-o’-the wisps. In his yearning for wings he is apt to proclaim a domestic rooster as an eagle; in his craving for sun, for light, he often mistakes a cardboard butaforial sun for Phœbus Apollo. Hence his admiration for that Arch-Borrower, Huneker. “He is one of the two or three American critics that are above Puritanic provincialism, that are broad, European!” exclaims Scavenger. It is true; but this truth serves only as a testimonia pauperitatis for the intellectual state of this country, where glittering counterfeit coins are less odious than Simon-pure Americanism. The Huneker-cult is one of the American tragedies of which I have spoken on other occasions, the tragedy of surrogates. The young generation, seething with longing for the great and the beautiful in life and art, is forced to feed on substitutes in the absence of real quantities. They want to read a living word about Verlaine, about Huysmans, about Matisse, about those winged titans who make Trans-Atlantic life so rich and pulsating, and they turn to Huneker, the great concocter of newspaper clippings and boulevard gossip. When Scavenger read for me Huneker’s admirable essay on Huysmans I was not yet aware that whatever was admirable in the essay had been borrowed almost in toto from Havelock Ellis’s Affirmations.[2] Why use the second or third-hand patched up cloak of Boulevardier-Huneker, when you may drink from the very source, from Arthur Symons, from Havelock Ellis, from—oh, well, who can recount them? Ah, the tragedy of substitutes!
The other evening, at a gathering of “The Questioners,” I accused Miss Harriet Monroe and Miss Margaret C. Anderson of being too lenient editors, in not trying to mould the taste of their contributors. What conscientious editor would allow a writer of Scavenger’s caliber to descend to the irritating rhetoric of “The Dionysian Dreiser”? To print this loud exaggeration immediately after Ben Hecht’s Songs and Sketches is to profess the rug-philosophy.
The Scavenger, as most of his colleagues, is a reformed Puritan. He finds boyish delight in reading an author who is a professional fence-wrecker and convention-smasher. To him immoralizing is a virtue per se. He hails Dreiser as the greatest, for things that he has not done. Dreiser is a genius because he has not followed the conventional novelist who makes his villain repent or perish. I admit this; but such a negative virtue, significant as it may appear in given conditions, does not qualify an artist. The “Genius” is not art. It is instructive, it is of great value for the study of contemporary America, as Mr. Masters pointed out. I can imagine that in the twenty-first century The “Genius” will be used as a textbook for the history of the United States in the end of the nineteenth century, for the author has minutely depicted our customs and morals, has gone into detailed description of country and city life, of farmers’ menues, of stomach-aches and their cure, of Christian Science wonders, of salaries and prices, of all the infinitesimal particles that compose the mosaique of mediocre life. Instructive—yes; but art—by no means. Let me quote Havelock Ellis’s Affirmations:
Three strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth a thousand of Denner’s. Rich and minute detail may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in the end.... When we are living deeply, the facts of our external life do not present themselves to us in elaborate detail; a very few points are—as it has been termed—focal in consciousness, while the rest are marginal in subconsciousness. A few things stand out vividly at each moment of life; the rest are dim. The supreme artist is shown by the insight and boldness with which he seizes and illuminates these bright points at each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due subordination.
Truisms, aren’t these? I wish Dreiser, “the greatest,” and his hailers would ponder over them before they apply the term art to 736 pages devoted to rumination of what Ellis calls “marginal elements” of life. And what a life! In what respect does the life of Witla, the “genius,” deserve so much elaboration and painstaking analysis? The hero’s only distinction is his sexual looseness. But he is not a Sanin who gratifies his animalistic instincts with contempt for motivation or justification. Witla, and Dreiser, and Scavenger, are reformed Puritans. When Witla falls in “love” with the round arm of a laundress, or with the golden hair of a country girl, or with the black eyes of an art-model, or with the perfect form of a gambler’s wife, or with the innocence of a mama’s girl; when in each case the lover swears and damns and lyricizes in bad English and strives to win and possess the object d’art, Mr. Dreiser appears from behind the sinner, pats him on the shoulder, and flings defiantly into the faces of the terrified philistines: “Witla is all-right. He is an artist. He loves beautiful things. See, God damn you?!” Is he? Throughout the long book we are told time and again that he is an artist. Unless we take the author’s word for it we are inclined to doubt it very much. True, an artist loves beauty; but does he necessarily desire to possess the object of his admiration? Does not the contemplation of a beautiful arm or sunset or flower or vase or rug bring the artist complete satisfaction and possession? I do not condemn Witla; although I dislike him, for he is a loud mediocrity. There is a Witla in every one of us men; but we take our Witla as our animalistic self, not as the artistic.
Ah, dear Scavenger, I do love rugs. But there are rugs and rugs.
[2] Affirmations, by Havelock Ellis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
The first edition of the book was issued about twenty years ago, yet one reads it now with keen joy. With the exception of the essay on Nietzsche, which is somewhat obsolete, the essays on Zola, Huysmans, Casanova, and St. Francis have stood the test of time. One feels the breeze of cleanness, freshness, sincerity, and profundity. I may have an opportunity of discussing the book some other time.