A Book of Prefaces

§ 7

Dreiser, like Mark Twain and Emerson before him, has been far more hospitably greeted in his first stage, now drawing to a close, in England than in his own country. The cause of this, I daresay, lies partly in the fact that “Sister Carrie” was in general circulation over there during the seven years that it remained suppressed on this side. It was during these years that such men as Arnold Bennett, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Frank Harris and H. G. Wells, and such critical journals as the Spectator, the Saturday Review and the Athenaeum became aware of him, and so laid the foundations of a sound appreciation of his subsequent work. Since the beginning of the war, certain English newspapers have echoed the alarmed American discovery that he is a literary agent of the Wilhelmstrasse, but it is to the honour of the English that this imbecility has got no countenance from reputable authority and has not injured his position.

At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate. When criticism is not merely an absurd effort to chase him out of court because his ideas are not orthodox, as the Victorians tried to chase out Darwin and Swinburne, and their predecessors pursued Shelley and Byron, it is too often designed to identify him with some branch or other of “radical” poppycock, and so credit him with purposes he has never imagined. Thus Chautauqua pulls and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle ground there proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of him by labelling him. One faction maintains that he is a realist; another calls him a naturalist; a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist. This debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has come a valuation by Lawrence Gilman29 which perhaps strikes very close to the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman, “a sentimental mystic who employs the mimetic gestures of the realist.” This judgment is apt in particular and sound in general. No such thing as a pure method is possible in the novel. Plain realism, as in Gorky’s “Nachtasyl” and the war stories of Ambrose Bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if we ever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their artistic combination, as in life itself, that fetches us—the subtle projection of the concrete muddle that is living against the ideal orderliness that we reach out for—the eternal war of experience and aspiration—the contrast between the world as it is and the world as it might be or ought to be. Dreiser describes the thing that he sees, laboriously and relentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is behind it. “He gives you,” continues Mr. Gilman, “a sense of actuality; but he gives you more than that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoric irrelevancies,... emerges a sense of the infinite sadness and mystery of human life.”...30

“To see truly,” said Renan, “is to see dimly.” Dimness or mystery, call it what you will: it is in all these overgrown and formless, but profoundly moving books. Just what do they mean? Just what is Dreiser driving at? That such questions should be asked is only a proof of the straits to which pedagogy has brought criticism. The answer is simple: he is driving at nothing, he is merely trying to represent what he sees and feels. His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that “obscure inner necessity” of which Conrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding. And jenseits von Gut und Böse. “For myself,” says Dreiser, “I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and I do not doubt any one absolutely. I think people are both evil and well-intentioned.” The hatching of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it is the flat rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that outrages petty minds; not being “good,” he must be “evil”—as William Blake said of Milton, a true poet is always “of the devil’s party.” But in that very groping toward a light but dimly seen there is a measure, it seems to me, of Dreiser’s rank and consideration as an artist. “Now comes the public,” says Hermann Bahr, “and demands that we explain what the poet is trying to say. The answer is this: If we knew exactly he would not be a poet....”

Footnotes

16 Fuller’s comparative obscurity is one of the strangest phenomena of American letters. Despite his high achievement, he is seldom discussed, or even mentioned. Back in 1899 he was already so far forgotten that William Archer mistook his name, calling him Henry Y. Puller. Vide Archer’s pamphlet, The American Language; New York, 1899.

17 For example, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, which runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10,000 pages, Huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and his remarkable mastery of English is barely mentioned in passing. His two debates with Gladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of the century, are not noticed at all.

18 A Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1909.

19 New York, 1917; reprinted from The Seven Arts for Feb., 1917.

20 Life, Art and America, p. 5.

21 The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday.

22 A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900.

23 New York, The Century Co., 1916.

24 In The Seven Arts, May, 1917.

25 The Nation, Dec. 2, 1915.

26 1186-1189. So translated by Floyd Dell: “O ye deathward-going tribes of man, what do your lives mean except that they go to nothingness?”

27 The New York Evening Post, Dec. 31, 1915.

28 Despite the comstockian attack, Dreiser is still fairly well represented on the shelves of American public libraries. A canvas of the libraries of the 25 principal cities gives the following result, an X indicating that the corresponding book is catalogued, and a—that is not:

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
New York	×	—	—	×	×	×	×	×
Boston	—	—	—	—	×	—	×	—
Chicago	×	×	×	×	×	×	×	×
Philadelphia	×	×	×	×	×	×	×	×
Washington	—	—	—	—	×	—	×	—
Baltimore	—	—	—	—	×	—	—	—
Pittsburgh	—	—	×	×	×	×	—	×
New Orleans	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Denver	×	×	×	×	×	×	×	×
San Francisco	×	×	×	×	×	—	—	×
St. Louis	×	×	×	×	×	—	×	—
Cleveland	×	×	×	×	—	×	×	—
Providence	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Los Angeles	×	×	×	×	×	×	×	×
Indianapolis	×	×	×	—	×	—	×	×
Louisville	×	×	—	×	×	×	×	×
St. Paul	×	×	—	—	×	—	×	×
Minneapolis	×	×	×	—	×	—	×	—
Cincinnati	×	×	×	—	×	—	×	×
Kansas City	×	×	×	×	×	×	×	×
Milwaukee	—	—	—	—	×	—	×	×
Newark	×	×	×	×	×	×	×	×
Detroit	×	×	×	—	×	×	×	×
Seattle	×	×	—	—	×	—	×	×
Hartford	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	×

Key to column headings:-

A Sister Carrie
B Jennie Gerhard
C The Financier
D The Titan
E A Traveler at Forty
F The “Genius”
G Plays of the Natural
H A Hoosier Holiday

This table shows that but two libraries, those of Providence and New Orleans, bar Dreiser altogether. The effect of alarms from newspaper reviewers is indicated by the scant distribution of The “Genius,” which is barred by 14 of the 25. It should be noted that some of these libraries issue certain of the books only under restrictions. This I know to be the case in Louisville, Los Angeles, Newark and Cleveland. The Newark librarian informs me that Jennie Gerhardt is to be removed altogether, presumably in response to some protest from local Comstocks. In Chicago The “Genius” has been stolen, and on account of the withdrawal of the book the Public Library has been unable to get another copy.

29 The North American Review, Feb., 1916.

30 Another competent valuation, by Randolph Bourne, is in The Dial, June 14, 1917.