Part 14

Those who work in the “modern temper” are unable to discover a worthy heroism to exalt. But if one turns to the records of classic art, he will find a nobility of spirit no less admirable to-day than in the past. His response will be an evidence of the existence of heroism, a proof of its reality in human nature. It will be a proof of its reality, of course, not in perfection but in aspiration. And if one looks about him he will find the same aspiration in living men and women. He will find it even expressed in deeds--imperfectly, humanly. If he should be artist enough to give adequate expression to what he feels and sees, he could rise above the dilemma against which naturalism has forced our modern literature.

Cynicism will, to be sure, urge that every man finds what he looks for, and to look for greatness will lead to a denial of evident imperfections. The humanist professes himself not unaware of the latter. Long before naturalist novelists pictured the bête humaine, Christianity declared man innately evil; but unlike naturalism, Christianity believed man capable of redemption by Grace. The humanist as such is not concerned with theology, and is content to believe that Grace, however it comes, is sometimes found. He is inclined to doubt that it comes only to those who have joined a church; he is inclined to believe that nobility is found now and again in all sorts and conditions of men. But the main thing is that it exists; and no artist who does not see the good with the evil sees life steadily and whole.

To follow the narrow path between cynicism and romantic idealisation; to recognise the imperfections in man and the inevitable domination of physical force over the individual, and yet to preserve admiration for the indomitable spirit which drives the individual to will and to do nobly; and finally to find adequate means of artistic expression--that is the task of one who would write great tragedy. Though hard, it is still possible. Only when the artist follows lofty standards can he hope to control and guide his own efforts toward sublimity. While humanism offers him no magic key to success, it offers him hope, and a discipline.

FOOTNOTES

I have considered the tragic emotions more fully in an article, “Melodrama and Tragedy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, September, 1928.

Since this paper was written my attention has been called to “Humanism and Tragedy,” an admirable article by Mr. F. McEachran (Nineteenth Century and After, July, 1929). Based on Professor Babbitt’s three levels of human conduct, naturalistic, human, and religious, Mr. McEachran’s thesis is that tragedy, since it demands an assumption of human dignity, cannot develop in a naturalistic age like the present, and is difficult in a religious one. The age of Pericles, of Elizabeth, and of Louis XIV were humanistic; they were followed by naturalistic decadence in which man and nature were equated and tragedy became impossible. Mr. McEachran’s “human dignity” and my “heroism” seem equivalent.

It is to be noted, as further illustration of the anti-heroic tendency of modern thought, that critics have sought to explain Hamlet as not a hero but a psychopath. What Shakespeare wished his audience to feel, however, seems open to no doubt.

From Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems, Boni & Liveright, 1925.

Should I remind the reader that in thus generalising I admit exceptions? One such, whom I have discussed elsewhere (Sewanee Review, April, 1929) is, in my opinion, Joseph Conrad.

An American Tragedy

ROBERT SHAFER

Mr. Theodore Dreiser’s critical friends have always been ready to admit his deficiencies as a literary artist, and these deficiencies are really extraordinary. Nevertheless, by universal consent Mr. Dreiser stands at the head of the realistic movement in American fiction, not merely because he is its pioneer, and has endured obloquy and even persecution for the Cause, but primarily on account of his seriousness and singleness of purpose, his depth of keen feeling, and his earnest reflectiveness. His work also anticipates in important respects the efforts of the post-realists and super-realists, so-called, and altogether has a present salience which insistently demands consideration.

The work, however, cannot be assessed--cannot indeed be understood--apart from the man; and fortunately Mr. Dreiser has written much about himself. He was born in 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, of German Catholic parents who struggled vainly against poverty. In the schools of another Indiana town he received the elements of an education, but apparently learned little of value to him beyond reading and writing. In boyhood and youth, in school or out, he became acquainted with a number of the better-known writers, chiefly of fiction, of the nineteenth century, but without gaining from them more than momentary entertainment. He has said that as a boy he “had no slightest opportunity to get a correct or even partially correct estimate of what might be called the mental A B abs of life.”

If the truth is to be told, one reason for this lay clearly within himself. For he was, as his records show him, a stupid boy and young man, lapped in vague reverie and hazy dreams of enjoyment, and roused slowly to puzzled observation and thought. “No common man am I,” he used to tell himself when he was scarcely out of his ’teens, with no evident reason save that with adolescence came an intense craving for freedom from the shackles of common life--freedom to indulge fully his temperamental longing for sensuous and materialised delight. This self-conceit helped to prevent him from learning what could have been learned during his boyhood, and, as he grew older, aroused in him bitter resentment against the limitations of his early environment.

Those limitations, at the same time, were extreme. The Dreiser household was one combining almost unrelieved ignorance with perfect tastelessness, presided over by a father whose consuming interest was a Catholicism degraded into mere ceremonies and prohibitions. Mr. Dreiser explicitly denotes the quality of the purifying influence dominant in the home and community of his youth: “One should read only good books ... from which any reference to sex had been eliminated, and what followed ... was that all intelligent interpretation of character and human nature was immediately discounted. A picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful.... The dance in our home and our town was taboo. The theatre was an institution which led to crime, the saloon a centre of low, even bestial vices.... It was considered good business, if you please, to be connected with some religious organisation.... We were taught persistently to shun most human experiences as either dangerous or degrading or destructive. The less you knew about life the better; the more you knew about the fictional heaven and hell ditto.... In my day there were apparently no really bad men who were not known as such to all the world, ... and few if any good men who were not sufficiently rewarded by the glorious fruits of their good deeds here and now!... Positively, and I stake my solemn word on this, until I was between seventeen and eighteen I had scarcely begun to suspect any other human being of harbouring the erratic and sinful thoughts which occasionally flashed through my own mind.”

By the time Mr. Dreiser had fairly formed the suspicion that, despite appearances, other people might not be much better than himself, his family had begun to break up, following the death of his mother, and he himself had been thrust into the world--or rather into Chicago, where the Dreisers by now lived--to earn his way. He did manage to spend one year at Indiana University, to the great improvement of his health, but with no positive intellectual benefit, so that he refused to waste a second year, which he might have had there. He confesses this, it should be said, in no boastful spirit. He was in fact made to realise at Bloomington that there were elements of knowledge which it would be useful to him to acquire--but he found the effort hopeless. His mind could not be constrained, and, besides, the deficiencies of his earlier schooling stood in his way. Hence he returned to Chicago, to become a collector for an easy-payment furniture shop.

It was at this time that his feelings--scarcely yet his imagination or his reason--were awakened by the spectacle of “America on the make.” He found that spectacle intensely vital. At the same time, too, he was doing the first reading that really came home to him:--he was reading a daily column of Eugene Field’s in a Chicago newspaper. It gave him the notion of doing something like that himself, and sent him hunting for a post on a news-sheet. This he finally obtained, and at the reporter’s desk achieved his real education, one not beyond his grasp. His first instructor promptly informed him that “life was a God-damned stinking, treacherous game, and that nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of every thousand were bastards.” The truth of this generalisation Mr. Dreiser proceeded to establish for himself, by observation of those of life’s realities which constitute news, and by intercourse with fellow-journalists. He discovered that practically all men, high or low, were lying hypocrites, outwardly professing a fine morality, but privately violating this without hesitation whenever it would serve their turn in the pursuit of gain or in the satisfaction of lust.

This was the reality, at any rate, which the young reporter saw, and which, as he says, broadened considerably his viewpoint, finally liberating him “from moralistic and religionistic qualms.” So liberated was he, indeed, that he came to judge men “thoroughly sound intellectually” in proportion as he found them “quite free from the narrow, cramping conventions of their day.” So liberated was he that he came to see the “religionist” for what he was: “a swallower of romance or a masquerader looking to profit and preferment.” He came also to see behind “the blatherings of thin-minded, thin-blooded, thin-experienced religionists” only “a brainless theory.” Nor was this the limit of his discoveries. He came further to see that life was not simply a ruthless struggle for material advantages, because, howsoever ruthless and intelligent one’s struggle, still, one might be defrauded by sheer accident. Chance seemed, at times, the final ruler of all things--many of the reporter’s assignments combining “to prove that life is haphazard and casual and cruel; to some lavish, to others niggardly.”

Mr. Dreiser, it is fair to say, was the more ready to learn these lessons of experience because, as he plainly tells his readers, he himself was lustful and passionately eager for the material satisfactions of life. He longed to join in the antics of the rich, who alone, as he judged, were bathed in happiness. He felt, as he gazed enviously upon the gilded sons and daughters of earth, that, from no fault of his, life was tragically cheating him. And this sense of grievance, feeding upon itself, passed easily through a sentimental phase into bitterness, as his reminiscences show: “Whenever I returned to any place in which I had once lived and found things changed, as they always were, I was fairly transfixed by the oppressive sense of the evanescence of everything; a mood so hurtful and dark and yet with so rich if sullen a lustre that I was left wordless with pain. I was all but crucified at realising how unimportant I was, how nothing stayed but all changed.... Life was so brief, ... and so soon, whatever its miserable amount or character, it would be gone.... But I, poor waif, with no definite or arresting skill of any kind, not even that of commerce, must go fumbling about looking in upon life from the outside, as it were. Beautiful women, or so I argued, were drawn to any but me.... I should never have a fraction of the means to do as I wished or to share in the life that I most craved. I was an Ishmael.”

Not always, of course, was Mr. Dreiser sunk in a bitterness induced by self-pity and sentimental regret. Often in moments of successful work or of flattering companionship he was quickly lifted up into a mood of expansive self-satisfaction, equally unbalanced. Then he would say to himself: “I must be an exceptional man.... Life itself was not so bad; it was just higgledy-piggledy, catch-as-catch-can, that was all. If one were clever, like myself, it was all right.” It was indeed magnificent, so long as the slave of temperament could dream of his heroic future as something assured. But dreams, like life, were unstable, and the fever for self-advancement, becoming intolerable from its intensity, would transmute itself--not every time into frank self-pity--but sometimes into tearful “sympathy for the woes of others, life in all its helpless degradation and poverty, the unsatisfied dreams of people.” And from the downtrodden for whom he wept he also drew a lesson. The hideous inequalities both of fortune and of capacity which he saw, proved to him that democracy, like morality, was a sham, a hollow convention, irrelevant, indeed opposed, to the facts of life and practice.

Mr. Dreiser’s journalistic career took him from Chicago to St. Louis, and thence, with several stops on the way, to Pittsburgh, during a period of rather more than three years. In these years, he says, speaking of his “blood-moods or so-called spiritual aspirations,” he was “what might be called a poetic melancholiac, crossed with a vivid materialistic lust of life.” His body, he adds, “was blazing with sex, as well as with a desire for material and social supremacy.” It is not surprising, consequently, that he found himself able to entertain carnal desires for several women at the same time--though this at first surprised him, and troubled him also, until his day of liberation from “moralistic qualms.” It is not surprising either that he presently was captivated by a charming country girl, several years older than himself, who had no single idea and only one desire in common with him. He had welcomed his liberation from “moralistic and religionistic qualms” the more complacently because of the simplification of thought and conduct to which it pointed. From this time the conduct of life was to be straightforward as well as simple, in accordance with the brutish yet vital law of following your dominant impulse regardlessly, ruthlessly, slavishly. But now this liberation itself was mainly instrumental in plunging him into a new, long-continued, and grievous difficulty. For his simple country maiden, though she was drawn to him as he was drawn to her, was nevertheless rigidly conventional, immovably “moralistic,” one of the predestined pillars of an ordered society and a stable family. She steadfastly refused to yield him her body without marriage, and he, alas, was not only unable to support her but deeply unwilling to marry her even if he could.

Clearly this pair did not understand all that divided them in spirit, but, still, Mr. Dreiser knew from the first some portion of the truth. For he knew what love really was: it was a mere “blood-mood”; it was a vivid lust crossed with poetic fires; it was irresistible, of course, but it was like everything else, transient, shifting, evanescent. He already suspected, as he later concluded, that monogamy--marriage indeed of any kind--was a debasing institution which not only killed the love that brought men to it, but also deformed and dwarfed their personalities. It might not harm stupid and lethargic men, but the man of individuality, at least, the highest type of citizen, required utter freedom to follow his vital impulses--required the joys of the sexual act “without any of the hindrances or binding chains of convention.” He knew, in fine, that “the tug of his immense physical desire for his beloved” might easily have been satisfied, despite his poverty, without compromising the future, and without doing a hurt to society, had there only been “any such thing as sanity in life,” outside of himself. He even knew, after the first raptures of idyllic feeling had passed, that any other beautiful woman would have served his need as well; but, nevertheless, he clung to this one, because in fact no beautiful woman whom he found accessible did keep alive in him the same fever of desire. Yet his beloved remained immovable, and so drew him on, through several years of miserably divided feeling, into a marriage finally accomplished after his carnal fires had cooled, owing to the passage of time and the casual ministrations of certain other fair creatures, more pliant, but unsatisfying.

I dwell upon this painful episode, following Mr. Dreiser’s own example, because it tells so much. It was the crucial event of his early life, and it left an ineffaceable scar. The fact is, indeed, that without definite knowledge of this miserable union, it would not be easy to understand how Mr. Dreiser became so obstinately fixed in those notions of life which journalism and its associations gave him and which he was eager to accept. Without definite knowledge of this marriage, further, it would be impossible fully to understand his novels; for none of them could have been written quite as it stands save in the light of this afflictive experience of his, and several, it is extremely likely, could not otherwise have been written at all.

Some knowledge of another side of Mr. Dreiser’s life, however, during his years of work for the news-sheets, is also necessary for those who would understand his novels. He has told us that in St. Louis the great literary idol of his associates was Zola, and after Zola, Balzac. These novelists, and especially the former, were constantly held up to him as models by one of his assignment-editors, who made it abundantly clear what Zola stood for. Mr. Dreiser read none of the Frenchman’s books at this time, but he did read an unpublished novel by two St. Louis newspaper men which made a deep and lasting impression upon him and which, as he later discovered, was wholly inspired by Zola and Balzac. This was “the opening wedge for him into the realm of realism,” and, too, “it fixed his mind definitely on this matter of writing,” firing him with a desire to create something of the sort himself. He thought the novel “intensely beautiful,” “with its frank pictures of raw, greedy, sensual human nature, and its open pictures of self-indulgence and vice.” In these indirect ways, evidently, Zola exerted upon the young reporter an influence real and significant. It was, indeed, probably much more important than the direct influence exerted by Balzac not long thereafter; though the accident which brought Mr. Dreiser to a fevered and ecstatic reading of many of Balzac’s novels, while he was in Pittsburgh, marked what was for him “a literary revolution.”

The crowning stage of Mr. Dreiser’s education, however, was now to come, while he was still in Pittsburgh, with his discovery of certain of the writings of Huxley, Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer. Huxley, Mr. Dreiser credits with finally dispelling the “lingering filaments” of Christianity still trailing about him; and Huxley’s work of dispersion was completed by Spencer’s First Principles. This book wholly “threw him down in his conceptions or non-conceptions of life” by its “questioning or dissolving into other and less understandable things” all that he had deemed substantial. “Up to this time,” he says, “there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to get on and the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one had to, and that it was of no importance. Of one’s ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic compulsions.... Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly driven one at that.”

The seeming ill logic of some of these remarks--the sudden concern over spiritual things felt by one who had hitherto devoted himself whole-heartedly to the world by sensuous appearances--is not unimportant. Clearly Spencer’s book left an abiding mark on Mr. Dreiser because it represented in a general way the abstract conclusion towards which his own observations had been pointing. Without knowing it, and without any attempt to set his intellectual house in order, he had himself been drifting towards a mechanistic naturalism. Spencer made him aware of this, and if, as he thought, that awareness left him crushed and hopeless, it at least seemed to clear his mind of rubbish, and to give his view-point self-consistency and finality. Nevertheless, he did not come forth a Spencerian; and, indeed, his debt to the Synthetic Philosophy may easily be exaggerated--the more easily because it really is important.

Mr. Dreiser emphasises the fact that his reading of the First Principles was followed by an emotional revulsion--a revulsion which the Synthetic Philosopher can scarcely alone have caused. And in truth just at the time when he stumbled upon Spencer his feelings were strained to the breaking-point. He had just returned from a last desperate, yet unsuccessful, effort to seduce his country maiden, which left him crushed, not only by that defeat itself, but by the consciousness that the gratification he was bound to secure was now driving him towards a marriage for which he had no capacity, no desire, and no prospect of sufficient means. Moreover, immediately after his Western visit he had gone, for the first time, to New York, where he had received an extraordinarily vivid impression of all the glories and delights of that worldly success, with its attendant wealth, which he so intensely craved. The sight had fired him to renew his efforts after so grand a reward, but, at the same time, had made him gloomily feel his distance from it, lodging in his mind a stubborn doubt if it could, after all, ever be attained by him. The combined weight of these experiences had intensified his already bitter sense of the world’s indifference to his desires and aims, of the world’s unconscious cruelty, and of its brutal injustice. He had eagerly embraced the world at his earliest opportunity, had reviled those who opposed themselves to it--and what was the world doing for him, what was it not blindly and carelessly doing against him? He was brought to the point of sheer despair, and was ready to turn upon the world--yet not ready to turn his back upon it. For he had not the slightest conception of any other than sensuous and worldly values, of any other than material gratifications which might bring to him fulness of life. Years ago he had defiantly closed that door, without in the least knowing what he was doing, and it was never to be opened to him. He was miserably exasperated by defeat, but the world’s appeal was still insistent and compelling, and would be heard and obeyed for many a year, whether or not it became suspect for a siren’s call.

In these circumstances the First Principles came really as a god-send. The book had the impressive appearance of being the voice of science itself uttering at last the Truth. Yet its weight and authority left undisturbed Mr. Dreiser’s worldliness and some of his dear prejudices. It left, indeed, everything as it was with him; but it did appear to rob everything of value, and so, as he thought, left him crushed and hopeless. Actually, however, it offered him a species of consolation for the crushed and hopeless state into which he had already been plunged by his efforts after a “realistic” way of life. A species of consolation;--because, though the dehumanised conception of the world and life presented by naturalism was “cold comfort,” still, it did enable one who felt badly used to turn upon the universe and say, if not feel, that life was a meaningless and unimportant phenomenon anyhow.