Part 15

The Synthetic Philosophy, Mr. Dreiser tells the world, “eternally verified” his “gravest fears as to the unsolvable disorder and brutality of life.” Precisely; as these turns of phrase show, it left his feelings what they had been, likewise his desires and aims, and his sentimental humanitarianism and more. What Spencer gave him was something to fall back upon and say in hopeless or disillusioned moments, but something which, leaving him otherwise where he was, even helped to preserve him inviolate from self-criticism or self-discipline. Following the guidance of temperament and mood, he took from Spencer what he wanted, and nothing else; and it so happened that this included little or nothing specifically characteristic of Spencer as against various other naturalistic thinkers. The tone, indeed, of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism, as well as its emphasis upon accident and chaotic disorder, is not only more sophisticated than that of Spencer’s, but abruptly contradictory of the Synthetic gentleman’s grandiose fancy of one eternal, universal law infallibly working to bring about perfection in all things earthly.

His dark emotional naturalism--and, it may be added, several of the contradictions it has involved him in--bring Mr. Dreiser, as some of his readers have perceived, close to Thomas Hardy, in proportion as he is far from Spencer. He does not mention Hardy in the record of his development which I have been following, but he is said to have confessed to “an enchanted discovery” of that novelist in 1896, and his delight is what was to be expected. As far as one can see, however, his indebtedness to Hardy, though real, is not important.

This, in summary form, is the story of Mr. Dreiser’s preparation for a novelist’s career. His first novel was published in 1900, and his sixth in 1925. Though from an early time he has had warm friends amongst the critics, still, even the most devoted of these have harshly condemned some of his books; and, in general, critical opinion, when not predominantly hostile, has been sharply divided. Nevertheless, in the face of whatever difficulties, Mr. Dreiser has slowly won a leading position in the world of fiction, for reasons which I began by mentioning. And his sixth novel, An American Tragedy, was, upon its appearance, widely proclaimed a masterpiece.

Certainly, moreover, An American Tragedy is by all odds the best of Mr. Dreiser’s novels, though perhaps not the most interesting. In it his language is still faulty, as in his earlier books; the quality of his style is mediocre, when not worse; his narrative is badly proportioned;--but, nevertheless, the novel also has excellences which its author had not previously achieved, and which are seldom to be found save in works of a serious and mature artistry. It has a sombre inevitableness, a self-contained adequacy, a restraint, dignity, and detachment which bespeak not merely the experienced craftsman, but also the workman’s sure grasp of his theme united with a deeply emotional confidence in its truth and importance. A far higher intelligence is exhibited in its execution than in Mr. Dreiser’s play, The Hand of the Potter (1918), whose theme is similar in several respects. If one should name a single change indicative of the intelligent masterliness of An American Tragedy, perhaps the most significant is the fact that in this book, for the first time, Mr. Dreiser has permitted his characters and events to speak entirely for themselves.

But though An American Tragedy marks a really notable advance in technique, and a heightened plausibility thus attained, partly through restraint, still, it exhibits Mr. Dreiser’s thought and the essential quality of his realism entirely unchanged. How Mr. Dreiser reached a mechanistic naturalism has above been shown, and how he became conscious of the fact. The appropriate result was that all his novels became tales of human irresponsibility, constructed to illustrate life’s contradiction of the hollow conventions of society, and life’s obedience to blind laws which make the individual’s experience a chaos with an end unrelated to desert. This is the theme of An American Tragedy, as of the earlier novels. It is a tale of human irresponsibility, supported by youthful prejudices never relinquished, built up on false antitheses, and capped by a merely circumstantial realism calculated to give the narrative a deceptive air of importance.

Youthful prejudice, for example, transparently dictates the important part played by religion in this novel. Religion is represented as an illusion capable of deceiving only those blind to life’s realities--the hopelessly incompetent and unintelligent, those whose advocacy would itself discredit any doctrine. Religion’s illusory nature is said to be self-evident, indeed, since it has much to say of Providence, yet manifestly bestows on the convert no worldly rewards, in satisfaction of the real needs and desires with which he is endowed, not by his own design or wish. Convention, too, is represented as a force which sways only the stupid and lethargic, which makes no demands entitling it to respect, and which the intelligent disregard deliberately, the temperamental wilfully. Intelligence itself is pictured as merely an instrument useful for devising methods of self-advancement;--in other words, as the servant of inborn temperament. And temperament is the one irresistible, compelling force in life, to which all else is ultimately obedient. Hence no one is really responsible for anything;--save, perhaps, the novelist who sees this important truth, at length, and by careful selection of appropriate matter is able to picture it for us.

Not even Mr. Dreiser’s expert care and long practice, however, are sufficient to enable him to evade a difficulty inherent in the nature of his theme. For the predicament of Roberta Alden is infinitely sad, and her creator narrates her history and murder with an exemplary truthfulness which emphasises that sadness to the full. Nevertheless, the reader’s sympathy is not invoked. The girl, on the contrary, is presented as the inevitable resultant of inheritance, environment, and sex, and she lives as an embodied energy rather than as a person. Extraordinary pains are taken, with all the multitudinous details of her story, to balance causes against effects, and she emerges a plausible creature. There is nothing incredible in her being just conventional enough and unwary enough and love-sick enough to suit the story’s purpose; but, too, there is nothing in her nature or her history to render either important. Indeed, her grievous distress, leading up to her murder, takes on, under Mr. Dreiser’s hand, the same significance as the squirming of an angleworm, impaled by some mischievous boy--no less, but certainly no more.

“Chemic compulsion” draws Roberta Alden as it draws other substances. “Chemic compulsion” epitomises the book. It “just happens”--and this is all--that “chemic compulsion” entangles Roberta with the squid--Clyde Griffiths, the defeated squid. For readers of Mr. Dreiser’s “epic” tale, The Financier, who recall the apologue of the lobster and the squid cannot fail to recognise Clyde Griffiths as the embodiment of the latter--and his cousin Gilbert as the patient, triumphant lobster. The squid, it need scarcely be said, commands no more sympathy than Roberta;--indeed, most readers inevitably must sympathise with the spirit of the “irate woodsman’s” brutal question during the trial. This undefiled son of the forest asked: “Why don’t they kill the God-damned bastard and be done with him?” But, just for this reason, it has to be remembered that Mr. Dreiser exhausts every possible means so to account for Clyde as to preserve him from all blame. The squid is the complete plaything of “chemic compulsion,” the paragon of irresponsibility, the perfect exemplar of the truth as the truth has been revealed to his creator.

This being so, it is little less than a miracle that Mr. Dreiser has contrived--through the infinite detail of a merely circumstantial realism--to save Clyde Griffiths’ humanity sufficiently to maintain the reader’s “suspension of disbelief” until the end of the book. Undoubtedly he has done so, though he has not succeeded in making all readers feel that patience has been adequately rewarded. They have been impressed, as is fitting before so monumental a composition; they have been troubled; they have not been recompensed. Eight hundred and forty pages devoted to the unconscionable prolongation of a mere sensational newspaper story! Remarks to this effect I have heard more than once; and they roughly indicate the real difficulty--the inevitably self-destroying effect of such an effort as Mr. Dreiser’s, in proportion as it is successful.

This difficulty, however, does not actually lie in the plot of An American Tragedy, as the remark just cited implies. The bare plot of the Agamemnon of Æschylus might equally well form the basis of a mere sensational newspaper story, and Clytemnestra in that play and in the Choephori makes for herself, not without seeming justice, the plea that is made for Clyde Griffiths. Not she, but Destiny, she says, through her its helpless instrument slew Agamemnon; and she also pleads that she did not make herself, yet can only act out her inborn nature. But it is not for his plots, nor because he was well acquainted with Mr. Dreiser’s view of life, that Æschylus lives on still amongst us. His dramas have a perennial and deep value for mankind because, rejecting the plausible notion of “chemic compulsion,” he struggled with profound conviction to convey a very different meaning through their form, characters, and action. Without evading any of its difficulty, he asserted his faith that Moral Law uncompromisingly governs the life of man, making for an order which is divine, in the face of a chaos intrinsically evil, and that men are fully, if tragically, responsible for the consequences of their acts, whatever their motives or compulsions, so that ignorance and self-conceit are equally as criminal as violence.

This is not to say all, of course, but it may suffice to show how Æschylus and, more clear-sightedly, Sophocles cut straight through to the centre of the human problem and propounded a solution which, if not the only one, nor by itself a complete one, is still, strictly speaking, irrefutable, being founded directly upon facts of experience which have not changed with the passing generations;--an unassailable solution, moreover, which gives weight and meaning to every individual and to all of his acts. And hence it is that the bloody and sensational fables of Æschylus and Sophocles, triumphantly formed in full harmony with their meaning, have an interest and value for men which time does not exhaust.

Mr. Dreiser’s difficulty is not that he has different facts of experience to interpret;--he has precisely the same facts concerning an essentially unchanged human nature. His difficulty is that his mechanistic naturalism compels him so to select and manipulate facts of experience as to deny, through his narrative, that human life has any meaning or value. The attempt is suicidal, and the more consistently it is carried out the more completely is Mr. Dreiser forced to divest his creatures and their actions of any distinctively human quality and meaning. The more successful he is the more insignificant his work becomes. An American Tragedy, as I have said, is more skilfully, faithfully, and consistently executed on the naturalistic level than any of its author’s earlier novels, and precisely for this reason it contains no single element of tragedy in any legitimate sense of the word, and it impresses thoughtful readers as a mere sensational newspaper story long drawn out. In other words, in proportion as Mr. Dreiser contrives to accomplish his self-imposed task he has nothing to tell us except that there is nothing to tell about life until it can be reduced even below the apparent level of animal existence, to the point where it becomes a meaningless chaos of blind energies.

Whether or not any real sense of the self-destroying character of this effort, to create a literature as valueless and insignificant as possible, will ever strike Mr. Dreiser’s consciousness, I should not venture to guess. But only an obstinate self-conceit, or an invincible stupidity, one imagines, could have kept him from seeing the absurdities into which he was forced, in the course of half-a-dozen sentences, when he recently attempted to draw up a brief statement of his present belief. He wrote: “I can make no comment on my work or my life that holds either interest or import for me. Nor can I imagine any explanation or interpretation of any life, my own included, that would be either true--or important, if true. Life is to me too much a welter and play of inscrutable forces to permit, in my case at least, any significant comment. One may paint for one’s own entertainment, and that of others--perhaps. As I see him the utterly infinitesimal individual weaves among the mysteries a floss-like and wholly meaningless course--if course it be. In short I catch no meaning from all I have seen, and pass quite as I came, confused and dismayed.”

To this point has Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism driven him. If the general sense of this awkward yet mannered statement comprised the truth about him and his work, he would, of course, never have been asked to make it. He would, in all probability, have been confined long ago to an asylum; and he would certainly never have written any of his books. Those books, moreover, have manifestly not been written just for his own entertainment. They have been written because he felt he had something to say--because of his certainty that he had come to know the truth, as men in general knew it not. And with singular faithfulness of purpose and of industry, involving what for him must have been almost superhuman effort, because of his defects of mind and training, he has devoted himself to the struggle to express the truth as he conceived it--that is, to reduce it to consistency and give it coherent form. He has also neglected nothing, within his limits, to make it impressive. He has thus lived a rationally purposive life, reducing at least to symptoms of order the welter of his impressions and impulses, controlling at least fitfully his rebellious temperament, and mastering (or “sublimating”) at least partially his almost pathological obsession by sex. For the sake of self-expression--or, as I shall presently suggest, of self-justification--he has thus achieved an appreciably disciplined life, and so has in his own person, against his own literary aim, furnished a convincing refutation of his philosophy. He has effectively proved that An American Tragedy gives form to a view of life as gratuitous as it is unmeaning.

Fortunately it is now realised by an increasing number of people that naturalistic philosophies are merely speculative ventures, which derive no valid support from “modern science.” And it has, besides, been shown above how little “science” had to do with the formation of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalistic prejudice. Mr. Dreiser, on his own showing, was first awakened to a sense of life as a problem to be solved by his discovery of the radical contrast between the ethical standards of his father and his church (as he understood its teaching), and his own spontaneous impulses and desires. His haphazard, undirected education gave him an unexcelled opportunity to learn that there were many others like himself, that they seemed to be the most vigorous members of their communities, and that they never hesitated to transgress every ethical standard, when they could get away with it, in their struggle for self-advancement and self-gratification. He treasured every impression which seemed to be on his side against ethical standards by which he stood condemned. His self-esteem had been gravely shocked by the discordance he had discovered, and he now found the means to restore it and, indeed, to strengthen it, by appeal from home and church to the larger world. Not he was in the wrong of it, but the “senseless,” “impossible” theories which would have convicted him of shameful tendencies. “In shame there is no comfort, but to be beyond all bounds of shame,” says one of Sidney’s Arcadians, and this Mr. Dreiser might thenceforth have taken for his motto.

Governed by this apolaustic prejudice, he has since continued his transparent course of seeing only what he has desired to see, or rather of admitting the reality of only what has suited him, while setting down all else as either hypocrisy or delusion. And while it is true that no one escapes the necessity of bringing only a selective attention to bear upon the outer world, it by no means follows that we are all alike cut off from “reality.” On the contrary, it does mean that the basis of our selective attention, the interests and purposes served by it, are of fundamental importance. And the disastrous effect of Mr. Dreiser’s apolaustic prejudice is that it encouraged him in slavery to mere temperament, in helpless surrender to the chaotic flow of “natural” impulses, while it brought to his attention from the outer world only what fed itself, the antics of complicated beasts with strange illusions. The trouble with what he thus saw is not that it was non-existent, some gross trick of the fevered imagination;--it was there to be seen--it is there, in grievous plenty. No, the trouble is that none of it has positive significance. The naturalism which it fathers lights up the animal in man, but tells man nothing of that which positively distinguishes him from the beast--more, it vindictively denies that anything save hypocrisy and delusion does so distinguish him. And while it seeks to dissolve our humanity, it ends, as it ends in Mr. Dreiser, in a bottomless morass of misrepresentation and despair. This is the American tragedy of our confused age which constitutes the real import of Mr. Dreiser’s masterpiece.

Note--For permission to quote from the writings of Mr. Dreiser, I am indebted both to him and to his publisher, Mr. Horace Liveright.

FOOTNOTES

In that which follows I draw chiefly upon A Book About Myself (1922), but also make use of A Hoosier Holiday (1916), Twelve Men (1919), and Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub (1920). A Traveler at Forty (1913) is also a revealing book.

I refer particularly to Jennie Gerhardt and The “Genius.” Limitations of space unfortunately prevent me from considering here any save Mr. Dreiser’s latest novel, An American Tragedy.

From the Bookman, September, 1928 (Vol. 68, p. 25).

Pandora’s Box in American Fiction

HARRY HAYDEN CLARK

America, Carlyle wrote Emerson, “is verily the Door of Hope to distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness.”

The Door of Hope! It is perhaps time now to ask down what corridors this door has led, to scrutinise the precise quality of American hope. Is it a new hope, or a disguised form of the European hope which has led “to blackness of darkness”? What, for example, have our fiction writers, reflecting the American mind, past and present, reported regarding the success of their quest for happiness? If they have reported that certain sorts of hope have led to despair, what evidence is there that other sorts lead to joy? For “the desire for happiness,” says Arnold, “is the root and ground of man’s being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness wrong, that he seeks for delight where delight will never really be found; then you illumine and further him.” Let us sketch the quality, first, of the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty; second, the hope of an American paradise of nature; and finally, the hope of “A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

If we consider the European background of the hope to escape to a paradise of supernal beauty and bliss, we find that in the classical legends of the Golden Age, in such Renaissance writers as Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, and in such later work as Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, this idyllic Arcadianism was either frankly recreational and non-philosophic or else a cloak for allegory. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century was the idyllic dream taken seriously. Revolting from earlier and contemporary restriction of the imagination, Akenside advocated refusing to “restrain” one’s “soaring fancy,” Joseph Warton glorified the “creative and glowing imagination,” and Edward Young sought to escape “this pestilential earth” by the “creative power” of the imagination to call forth paradisiacal beauties, “shadowy beings and unknown worlds,” in the “vast void beyond real existence.” He exalted a genius which was to “wander wild” in “the fairy land of fancy,” “reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras,” and “sport with its infinite objects uncontrolled.” Thus in Vathek Beckford created a sensuous and erotic paradise with its five palaces which he destined “for the particular gratification of each of the five senses.” “The light that never was, on sea or land,” enthralled the youthful Wordsworth, but he soon questioned it as a “fond illusion.” Keats sought to escape on “the viewless wings of Poesy” from the “weariness” of actuality to the “charmed magic casements.” Shelley, the high priest of this ceaseless and aimless quest for the unattainable, tells us that only his “fearful and monstrous” story of The Cenci is “a sad reality”; otherwise he “dreams of what ought to be, or what may be.” For him the Spirit of Beauty leaves “This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate.” His is a longing indeterminate, a

“devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.”

“I loved I know not what--but this low sphere, And all that it contains, contains not thee.”