Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
_The Jungle_ (1906); a story of the packing houses and the immigrant:
the technique of “speeding up” and the labor scrap-heap. The social
consequences of the profit principle--saving everything but the squeal
of the hog and the health of the laborer.
_King Coal_ (1917); a story of the Rockefeller coal fields in Colorado
and the miners’ union. Probably his most skillful story.
Numerous other titles, among them: _The Brass Check_, an examination
of the American newspaper--the charge that these are the tools
of plutocracy; _The Goose Step_, an examination of the American
university--the charge that these serve wealth; _The Goslings_, an
attack upon the public school as an agent of capitalism.
Theodore Dreiser: Chief of American Naturalists[819]
Against this background of eager ferment and various propaganda stands
Theodore Dreiser, who is of this changing world and yet apart from
it: the most detached and keenly observant of all our writers, a huge
figure of ungainly proportions--a heavy-footed peasant with unslaked
curiosity and a boundless pity, who is determined to examine critically
“this animal called man” and portray him truthfully. He tramps across
fields straight to his objective, messing sadly the neat little beds
of American convention, peering into the secret places that are marked
“Not Open To The Public,” keeping nothing hidden, ashamed of nothing,
apologizing for nothing. Not since Walt Whitman has there been another
such frank and detached projection of reality, such insistence that the
world shall stop and consider those facts which convention has politely
agreed to ignore. Naturally a great hue and cry of the Pharisees
has been raised against him. The respectable middle class will have
none of this peasant directness and brutal truth. He has entered our
_bourgeois_ society “murmurous of morality” with an alien philosophy,
which he must defend. At every moment he feels under the necessity
of assisting the truth as he sees it, and instead of suffering his
portrayal to stand on its own feet he props it up with argument and
interminable debate. The artist suffers at the hands of the disputant.
_The Man and his Philosophy._ Marked by an immense and open-eyed
curiosity that ends in agnosticism. His anthropocentric conceptions:
I have lived now to my fortieth year and have seen a good deal of
life.... But I am one of those curious persons who cannot make up
their minds about anything. I read and read.... But I find that one
history contradicts another, one philosopher drives out another.
Essayists, in the main, point out flaws and paradoxes in the
current conception of things, novelists, dramatists and biographers
spread tales of endless disasters, or silly illusions concerning
life, duty, opportunity and the like. And I sit here and read and
read, when I have time, wondering.[820]
“Nothing is proved, all is permitted,” he says in _The Titan_. Men
will do what they think they can get away with. In briefest terms his
philosophy may be phrased thus:
1. The world is without reason or meaning to us. Why we are here and to
what end is unknowable.
2. Men are chemical compounds, existing in a world where they play
about like water-flies, skipping restlessly and unintelligently as
their legs drive them, whom the universe in its vast indifference
suffers for a time.
3. Men divide into the strong and the weak; not the good and the bad.
The will to power, the desire for pleasure, drive men on their courses.
What restrains? Moral codes and social conventions, often useful, often
harmful.
A metaphysical idealism will always tell him that it is better to
preserve a cleanly balance, and the storms of circumstance will
teach him a noble stoicism. Beyond this there is nothing which can
reasonably be imposed upon the conscience of man.[821]
4. Hence the profound need of sympathy and mercy.
Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony
universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely. From the
prowling hunger of the Hyrcan tiger to the concentric grip of
Arcturus and Canopus there is the same ruthless, sightless
disregard of the individual and the minor thing. Life moves in
an ordered hierarchy of forces of which the lesser is as nothing
to the greater ... And in the midst of the rip of desperate
things--in odd crannies and chance flaws between forces--there
spring and blossom these small flowers of sentiment. Tenderness!
Mercy! Affection! Sorrow! The Hindus worship an image of pain.
And well they may. It is a classic amid the painless, the
indifferent--Nirvana. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall
receive mercy! No, no. Blessed are the merciful, for they create
mercy. Of such is the kingdom of the ideal.[822]
_His Attitude toward his Material._ Dreiser possesses a vast and
terrifying imagination. Like James Branch Cabell he broods over the
plight of man in the universe. But he does not seek refuge in the
ideal. He will confront things as they are. The very chemistry of
decaying flesh fascinates him. It is a phenomenon of this impersonal
and relentless universe. Compared with the realities of time and space
and force--what is man and what are his puny efforts and ideals?
The damnable scheme of things which we call existence brings about
conditions whereby whole masses suffer who have no cause to suffer,
and ... whole masses joy who have no cause for joy.... We suffer
for our temperaments, which we did not make, and for our weaknesses
and lacks, which are no part of our willing or doing.[823]
_His Objectivity._ The larger view of life gives detachment. Only one
who has emerged from the jungle can see the whole in broad perspective.
In no other American writer, except Whitman, is such complete
detachment achieved. His life is a long process of stripping away group
illusions, of casting off group conventions. And for this the mass
cannot forgive him, for the mass live in the strait-jacket of custom,
thinking in no other terms than group or tribal terms, worshiping the
communal idols, clinging to the tribal taboos. They cannot achieve
individuality themselves and they hate Dreiser. It puts him outside the
tribe, for the first law of the tribe is tribal-mindedness. Whoever is
not of us is against us. Whoever questions the validity of the tribal
sanctions is an enemy and must be destroyed. It is in vain that Dreiser
asserts vehemently that he is telling the truth. Another version of the
truth than the tribal version is not wanted.
The significance of Dreiser lies in the fact that he is an individual
apart--one who has broken with the group and sits in judgment on the
group sanctions. He is an anarchist who will be partisan to no taboos.
This is a rare and perilous thing to do. He stands outside.
_His Amoral Attitude._ It is on this score that Dreiser stands
condemned by our _bourgeois_ censors. His amoral attitude is strangely
metamorphosed into immorality. His indifference to the common
preachments, his inability to accept Christian maxims, his refusal to
do lip service to creeds--this is set down as evidence of viciousness,
for _ipso facto_ there can be no other moral standards than the
tribal standards. What is Dreiser’s justification? This, that in the
physical universe he can discover no morality--no justice, mercy,
pity, but everywhere great and indifferent force. And in society--in
the instincts of men and in their hidden desires and secret acts--a
disregard of conventional morality. Society is steeped in hypocrisy.
He saw no morals anywhere--nothing but moods, emotions, needs,
greeds. People talked and talked, but they acted according to their
necessities and desires.[824]
But in frankly revealing the hypocrisy of men Dreiser is no cynic.
There is in him a profound morality--the morality of truth and pity
and mercy. Let us not stone men for their sins but deal generously and
kindly with them. What he protests against is superimposed codes. There
is, for him, “in Nature, no such thing as the right to do, or the right
not to do.”[825]
But is there not social expediency? To which the individual for his own
good should conform? Experience has taught men some excellent things.
_His Work._ Dreiser has given us full-length portraits of two
women--Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt--and of two men--Eugene
Witla and Frank Cowperwood. These constitute his major contribution
and on them his reputation rests.[826] In addition there is _Hey
Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, a book of essays in which his philosophy is set forth,
a naturalistic play, _The Hand of the Potter_--a study in pathology
where the hand of the potter slipped--a book of travel, and some
short stories. Of his four major characters the two women are passive
and pliable, easily made victims of circumstance. Of the two men
one--Eugene Witla--is weak, and the other--Frank Cowperwood--is the
supreme example in American literature of the will to power.
_The Financier_ and _The Titan_. A colossal study of the American
business man, in two volumes of a total of 1332 pages. Compared with
this all other studies are crude and unconvincing. Here the thing has
been done once for all.
“These crude and greedy captains of finance had to be given some kind
of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a raw epic out of
their lives.”[827]
Where did Dreiser get his intimate and detailed information concerning
high finance? Where his knowledge of such a character? Out of his own
powerful mind. Cowperwood a portrait of Charles Yerkes. Two periods:
his Philadelphia life to 1873; his Chicago life to 1898. In both he
molds circumstance to his advantage; in both he is caught by chance and
fails.
_The Man._ Driven by three impulses: love of power, love of women, love
of art. There is in him a unity of character and an inevitability of
development that are overwhelming. Dreiser does not judge, apologize,
praise, or condemn; he is content to permit the character to develop.
From first to last he is detached and objective. He presents Cowperwood
as a magnificent physical and mental machine: a born fighter and
leader, strong, alert, with a cool resourceful mind. A pronounced
hardness that goes with strength--contempt for the weakling, impatience
with the inefficient. In his sex passages there is no glamour of
romance. They are direct and brutal--but more moral than glamorous.
Nevertheless great personal charm--the magnetism of a virile mind and
indomitable will. To men he is an inspiration, to women a fascination.
And yet a frank egoist, self-centered, imperturbable.
The fate of the individualist: in pitting his will against life
Cowperwood feared chance, which undid him in Philadelphia. But his
very prevision, which carried him to triumph, brought his downfall.
The many are stronger than the superman. And in the end, failure.
Strength endures for so short a time and is so weak. Age, weakness,
social forces--these undermine the strong. A vast irony. Cowperwood is
punished not because he is evil but because he is a man.
_Cowperwood’s Philosophy._ From his youth up life was a puzzle to him.
Nothing was certain, for beyond and above all was a blind, irrational
chance. Nevertheless within reasonable limits it was plain enough that
strength and intelligence prevail. This lesson he first learned from
the squib and the lobster, and it became his guiding principle. When
chance had brought him within the shadow of the penitentiary, he summed
it up:
It is a grim, bitter world we are all born into.... Who was to
straighten out the matter of the unjust equipment with which most
people began? Who was to give them strong minds in place of feeble
ones, able bodies instead of wretched ones? Where were they to get