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