Part 15

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.”[44]

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

[42] 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.

[43] 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_.

[44] 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.”

I

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.”

_Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_ are matchless records of his fruitless quest for the phantom of desire. DeQuincey’s fantasies are “filled with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of forgotten deliriums.” _The Lady of Shalott_ and _The Palace of Art_ testify to Tennyson’s reluctant renunciation of the life of illusion. Swinburne characterised himself in _A Nympholept_, while his friend, the author of _The Earthly Paradise_, strove to

“build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea.”

With this background in mind, let us see to what extent the American story-tellers’ hope for a paradise of supernal beauty coincides with the idyllic, indeterminate hope of the English romanticists. In _The Author’s Account of Himself_, Irving, our first master of the short story, states his Old World longing “to escape, in short, from the common-place realities of the present,” to “the shadowy grandeurs of the past,” the “earthly paradise” of “Bellissima Granada” and the legend-haunted Alhambra. _The Legend of Prince Ahmed al Kamel_, dealing with the quest for the phantom of desire, illustrates the idyllic quality of his imagination. The Prince, called the “Perfect” on account of his “super-excellence,” receives from a dove tidings of a fair princess--“no flower of the field could compare with her for loveliness.” In the Spanish spring-time the Prince, a “pilgrim of love,” resolves to “seek this unknown princess throughout the world.” Guided by a parrot and an owl, he eventually finds her in the court of her hostile father. The lover produces his “silken carpet of the throne of Solomon,” and after confessing his devotion, “the carpet rose in the air, bearing off the prince and princess ... and then disappeared in the blue vault of heaven.” Irving, however, sought “escape ... from the common-place” not only in the picturesque fantasies of Old Spain but also in the glamorous aspects of the American past, as illustrated in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. In “a remote period of American history,” among “some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson,” Ichabod rides on a “fine autumnal day” through the “rich and golden livery” of a natural paradise to win the “peerless,” “ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked Katrina” and her “unimaginable luxury.” Introduced by lines from _The Castle of Indolence_, _The Legend_ illustrates Irving’s somewhat sentimental and humorous continuation of the merely recreational Arcadianism of earlier days. And the ruse of the Headless Horseman, in connection with the “twilight superstitions” of one who was “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s _History of New England Witchcraft_,” suggests the interesting tendency of the native Puritan interest in things unearthly, with the waning of faith, to become a subject for the æsthetic imagination as in the case of Hawthorne and Poe.

Unlike Irving, Poe takes the idyllic dream seriously. He defines the Poetic Principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” manifested “in an elevating excitement of the Soul.” Of course, as every one knows, his vigorous reason controlled the decadent imagination and emotion of the earlier Gothic school and made him perhaps our greatest master of the short story technique. But let us illustrate and define the content of his “aspiration,” his “elevating excitement of the Soul.” Where does he seek happiness? One thinks of the “delirious bliss” of “the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass” in _Eleanora_. We might better, however, turn to _The Domain of Arnheim_, where Ellison, with “_a fortune of four hundred and fifty million dollars_,” seeks to satisfy his passion for an exclusively “physical loveliness,” his “four elementary conditions of bliss,” which are “free exercise,” “the love of woman,” “contempt of ambition,” and “an object of unceasing pursuit.” After a four year quest he finds in the “luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands” “an elevated tableland of wonderful fertility and beauty”; it was the “Paradise of Arnheim,” combining everything rich and voluptuous. Ellison, however, sought to gratify the “one passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty,” “above all ... in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness and love enveloped his existence in the pure atmosphere of Paradise.” Thus the content of Poe’s aspiration, as well as his references here to the “chimera of the perfectionists” “Turgot, Price, Priestley and Condorcet,” to “Fonthill,” the birthplace of _Vathek_, and to the “rapt day-dreams of De Staël,” suggest that his aspiration is essentially one with that ceaseless and aimless sensuous longing already illustrated in the English romanticists. Or take _The Island of the Fay_, which deals with the contemplation of “the glory of God” in “natural scenery”--“all within the Spirit Divine”--in a “rivulet and island,” “all one radiant harem of garden beauties.” Shelley-like, he sees approach the “enchanted” island a gentle Fay in a “fragile canoe” with a “phantom of an oar.” This vision of loveliness, however, passed “disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood,” and “darkness fell over all things and I beheld her magical figure no more.” Thus, as Professor Foerster has so finely said, Poe gives us only “shuddering harmonies of the murky subconscious, and roseate harmonies of sensuous longing posing as spirituality.... His vision oscillated not between the earthly and the supernal, but between the infernal and the Arcadian.” But what did Poe report regarding the success of his aspiration for supernal beauty? “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart,” he concludes, “is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.” Thinking of writing a book on his life, he said: “No man will ever dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”