¹ “I was never tired of looking at the hot, hungry, weary slums.” (A Book About Myself [New York, 1922], p. 210.) “I was honestly and sympathetically interested in the horrible deprivations inflicted upon others, their weaknesses of mind and body, afflictions of all sizes and sorts, the way so often they helplessly blundered or were driven by internal chemic fires …” (Ibid., p. 140.) Dreiser experienced poverty as well as observed it in his youth, yet he never developed a cynical indifference to suffering. Indeed, “it was the underdog that always interested me more than the upper one, his needs, his woes, his simplicities.” (Ibid., p. 370.)

² He tells of “finding both Old and New Testaments to be not compendiums of revealed truth but mere records of religious experiences … and then taking up First Principles and discovering that all I deemed substantial—man's place in nature, his importance in the universe, this too, too solid earth, man's very identity save as an infinitesimal speck of energy or a ‘suspended equation’ drawn or blown here and there by larger forces in which he moved quite unconsciously as an atom—all questioned and dissolved into other and less understandable things, I was completely thrown down in my conceptions or non-conceptions of life.” (Ibid., pp. 457–458.) Elsewhere he tells of his eagerness for life: “Soon the strength time, the love time, the gay time, of color and romance, would be gone, and if I had not spent it fully, joyously, richly what would there be left for me then? The joys of a mythical heaven or hereafter played no part in my calculations. When one was dead one was dead for all time. Hence the reason for the heartbreak over failure here and now; the awful tragedy of a love lost, a youth never properly enjoyed. Think of living and yet not living in so thrashing a world as this, the best of one's hours passing unused or not properly used.” (Ibid., p. 198.)

³ See note 2, and such a statement as the following: “The world, as I see it now, has trussed itself up too helplessly with too many strings of convention, religion, dogma. … Is it everybody's business to get married and accept all the dictates of conventional society—that is, bear and rear children according to a given social or religious theory?” (Ibid., p. 326.)

⁴ To him the universe is characterized by eternal, purposeless flux. The vast patterns of cosmic change were doubtless comprehensible to a being sufficiently omniscient to see all the particles at once; but even so the pattern would reveal no moral or ethical purpose: “Indeed the rough balance or equation everywhere seen and struck between element and element, impulse and impulse … really indicates nothing more than this rough approximation to equation in everything—force with matter, element with element—as an offset to incomprehensible and, to mortal mind, even horrible and ghastly extremes of disorder! nothing more.” (Bey Rub-A-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Terror and Wonder of Life [New York, 1919], pp. 157–158.)

⁵ “Of one's ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic compulsions, something which for some inexplicable but unimportant reason responded to and resulted from the hope of pleasure and the fear of pain. Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly driven one at that. … There was of course this other matter of necessity, internal chemical compulsion, to which I had to respond whether I would or no.,… With a gloomy eye I began to watch how the chemical—and their children, the mechanical—forces operated through man and outside him.” (A Book About Myself, p. 458.) Dreiser does not pretend to comprehend the workings of the mind, but he is, apparently, sure that there is nothing transcendental in it. He hides part of its mystery behind the term “chemic.”

⁶ He describes the literary influence of Balzac (Ibid., p. 412) and of a Zolaësque novel written by one of his fellow-newspaper men (Ibid., pp. 126 and 131–133), but he has admitted that he had not read anything by Zola before writing Sister Carrie; see Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (New York, 1932), p. 95. Literary influences are clearly secondary.

⁷ Sister Carrie (New York, 1900; ed. 1917), p. 362.

⁸ Ibid., p. 494.

⁹ Ibid., p. 557.

¹⁰ Idem.

¹¹ American reviewers were also offended by its treatment of lives which they deemed too sordid for genteel readers. See D. Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers, p. 186.

¹² Sister Carrie, p. 85/—The italics are added.

¹³ Ibid., p. 101.

¹⁴ Above, note 2.

¹⁵ Sister Carrie, p. 362.

¹⁶ The gap between Dreiser's work and the experimental novel of Zola is a wide one, for Dreiser does not make even a pretense of controlling his conditions and discovering truths about the nature of human psychology and physiology. Just where Zola, for example, would theoretically put most emphasis—i.e., on the extraction of laws about human nature—Dreiser is most uncertain and most sure that no certainty can be attained. To him such laws would be fruitless for the very reason that external conditions cannot ever be controlled—a fact of which all his experience had convinced him.

¹⁷ We here assume that the central element of what is known as a personality is the existence of will. The moment a character comes alive and achieves individuality the reader becomes conscious of a will which is the new force that has come into being. A perfectly naturalistic character might—though it would be at once monstrous and uninteresting—be so completely “explained” that it would have neither personality nor will. But Dreiser believes in individuality, and apparently he accepts it as a final reality behind which he cannot penetrate. For him will—as life-impulse and the power to make ethical choices—exists. Dreiser, however, would not recognize any ethical absolutes; nor would he free this power of “ethical” choice from those influences which have determined what the individual recognizes as good and bad.

¹⁸ A circumstance is an influence so removed from its causal sequence that it appears accidental.

¹⁹ George Eliot (who was respected in her day as a psychologist) shows how the will operates in the midst of all the conditions and pressures of modern life. With her, however, the will to make ethical choices does operate among all these conditions: it is implicit in her writing that the will represents the divinity in man, his contact with God. Dreiser on the other hand shows how the will is operated upon. He admits the empirical fact of its autonomy, but he thinks of it as a product of “chemic” reactions. His metier is not a psychological study of how the will operates, but a study of how it is controlled and influenced. For Dreiser moral responsibility is not so important as the study of forces. For George Eliot moral responsibility is of tremendous importance; it is a concept which her study of the mind in action does not impair, for her novels are built around choices which are, though never so carefully documented, seen as free and hence judgeable.

²⁰ Jennie Gerhardt (New York, 1911; ed. 1926), pp. 15–16.

²¹ Ibid., pp. 290–291.

²² Ibid., pp. 400–401. This passage is notable as the most explicit statement of belief in the novel. It comes from Lester, but it represents Dreiser's own attitude because it is virtually the thesis of his novel.

²³ Ibid., p. 422.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 431.

²⁵ Volume iii, The Stoic, has been announced, but apparently it will not be published. See below, p. 289 and note 42.

²⁶ Quoted in Charmian London, The Book of Jack London (New York, 1921), ii, 57.

²⁷ Stuart P. Sherman, On Contemporary Literature (New York, 1917), p. 98.

²⁸ See note 17, above.

²⁹ Dreiser comments as follows upon the “meaning” of life: “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.” (“Statements of Belief,” The Bookman, lxviii [September, 1928], 25.)

³⁰ The Financier (New York, 1912; ed. London, 1927), p. 35.

³¹ The Financier, p. 140.

³² The Titan (New York, 1914; ed. London, 1928), p. 461.

³³ Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub, p. 89; quoted from Harry Hartwick, Foreground of American Fiction (New York, 1934), p. 97. These ideas, expressed in 1919, show Dreiser touched by the Nietzschean philosophy; they precede his conversion to socialism. Mr. Hartwick, however, goes on to insist that they prove Dreiser to have admired and condoned the behavior of Cowperwood as valuable to society. This cannot be entirely true, for the course of the novels does not show Cowperwood to have been socially useful. The ethical implications are considered further below.

³⁴ The Titan, p. 542.

³⁵ The Financier, pp. 9–12.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 510.

³⁷ Theodore Dreiser (New York, 1925), p. 78.

³⁸ The Financier, pp. 152–153. “That the modern home is the most beautiful of schemes, when based upon mutual sympathy and understanding between two. need not be questioned. And yet this fact should not necessarily carry with it a condemnation of all love not so fortunate as to find so happy a denouement. Life cannot be put in any mould, and the attempt might as well be abandoned at once.”

³⁹ Ibid., p. 147.

⁴⁰ An American Tragedy (2 vols., New York, 1925), ii, 78–80.

⁴¹ Dreiser's repeated questioning of moral codes is a criticism of society for its effects upon the individual—not a recognition of the effect of the individual on society.

⁴² This doubtless accounts for his inability to complete The Stoic and round out his “Trilogy of Desire.” That novel, in order to preserve the unity of tone of the other two, would have also to be written from the viewpoint of the superman—a very difficult task for a socialist.

⁴³ We cannot deal at length with the problem of whether such a book can be called a tragedy at all. Certain obvious modifications, indeed, must be made in the Aristotelian definition if it is to cover An American Tragedy, but they are not intolerable modifications. The hero is not noble, his will—and hence his tragic flaw—are minimized; but the protagonist is destroyed by forces beyond his control. That Clyde is a sordid rather than a noble character—a condition which violates the Aristotelian definition—and yet his tragedy is compelling rather than contemptible to a modern audience.