CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 'H i N72 077^°™*" ""'™™''y "-Ibrary Life, art and America, olln 3 1924 032 635 405 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032635405 LIFE, ART AND AMERICA By THEODORE DREISER Reprinted from the February, 1917, issue of The Seven Arts Life, Art and America By Theodore Dreiser I DO not pretend to speak with any historic or sociologic knowledge of the sources of the American ethical, and therefore critical, point of view, though I suspect the origin, but I, personally, am at last convinced that, whatever its source or sense, it does not accord with the facts of life as I have noted or experienced them. To me, the average or somewhat standardized American is an odd, irregularly de- veloped soul, wise and even f roward in matters of mechanics, organizations, and anything that relates to technical skill in connection with material things, but absolutely devoid of any , 'true spiritual insight^ny correct knowledge of the history of literature or art, and confused by and mentally lost in or over- come by the multiplicity of the purely material and inarti- culate details by which he finds himself surrounded. '' As a boy in the small towns, in which I, at least, was raised, I personally had no slightest opportunity to get a correct or. even partially cdffectestimate of what might be called the mental A B abs of life. I knew nothing of history, and there was not a book in any of the schools which I attended labeled either history, or science, or art, called to my attention, which contained the least suggestion of the rationale which I subsequently came to feel to be relatively true, or at least ac- ceptable to me. If I remember correctly, in the history of the world which was labeled Swinton's, the defeat of Napoleon, not his career, was pointed out as having had a great moral, if not Christian, Life, Art and America value to the world. His end on St. Helena (not the code Napoleon, or the hieratic and ultra economic arrangement of his material forces) was supposed to have achieved something 1 for society! Similarly Socrates and his death were descanted on as having almost a religious, if not a Christian import. His I death was painted as having been brought about by his higher moral views — not his private deeds 1 The true significance of the man as illustrated by the exact details of his life were utterly ignored. I could go on by the hour, the day, the week. Personally, because my father was a Catholic, and I was baptized in that faith, I was supposed to accept all the dogma, as well as the legends of the Church, as true. In the life around me I saw flourishing the Methodist, the Baptist,^ the United Brethren, the Christian, the Congregationalist, the what-not churches, each one representing, according to its ad- herents, the exact historic and truthful development and inter- pretation of life or the world. As a fourteen or fifteen year old boy, I listened to sermons on hell, where it was, and what was the nature of its torments. As rewards for imaginary good behavior I have been given colored picture cards con- taining exact reproductions of heaven ! Every newspaper that 1 have ever read, or still can find to read, has had an exact code of morals, by the light of which one might detect at once both Mr. Bad Man and Mr. Good Man, and so save one's self from the machinations of the former! The books which I was advised to read, and for the neglect of which I was frowned upon, were of that naive character known as pure. One should read only good books — which meant, of course,; books from which any reference to sex had been eliminated ^nd what followed as a natural consequence was that all in- telligent interpretation of character and human nature was immediately discounted. ^" A picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful.' A statue equally so. The dance in our home and our town Theodore Dreiser •jvas taboo. The theater was an institution which led to crime. iThe saloon a center of low, even bestial, vices. The existence lof such a thing as an erring or fallen woman, let alone a house of prostitution, was a crime, hardly a fact to be considered. There were forms and social appearances which we were taught to wear, quite as one wears a suit of clothes. One had to go to church on Sunday whether one wanted to or not. It was considered good business, if you please, to be connected with some religious organization, and, by the same token, this commercialized religiosity was transmuted into a glistening virtue! A young man who went to church for that reason was not a low mountebank or shameless interloper, but an indi- vidual of moral worth! 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, the same. People walked in a form of sanctified maze or dream, hypno- tized or self-hypnotized by an erratic and impossible theory of human conduct, which had grown up heaven knows where or how, and had finally cast it amethystine spell over all America, if not over all the world. Now, I have no particular quarrel with this, save that it is so impossible, so inane. In my day there were no really bad men who were not practically known as such to all the world, or at least quickly detected, and few, if any, good men who were not sufficiently rewarded by the glorious fruits of their good deeds ! Positively, I stake my solemn word on this, until I was between seventeen and eighteen, I had scarcely begun to suspect that any other human being was so low as to harbor the erratic and sinful thoughts which occasionally flashed through my own mind. At that time I was actually beginning to suspect that some of the things which had been laid down to me by one authority tend another, and which I have here previously indicated in Life, Art and America a brief way, were not true. All so-called good men were no^ necessarily good, I was beginning to suspect, and all bad men not hopelessly bad. There were things in cities and town^ which, as I was beginning to see, did not accord with th^; theories of the particular realm from which I sprang, and seemed to indicate another kind of human being, different to the type among which I had been raised. My mother, as I was beginning to suspect — admire her as much as I might — was a mere woman, not an angel; my father a mere, mere crotchety man. My sisters and brothers were individuals such as I soon began to find were breasting the stormy waters of ,life outside, and not very different to all other brothers and sisters — not perfect souls set apart from life, and happy in the contemplation of each other's perfections. In short, I was beginning to find the world a seething, stormy, bitter, gay, rewarding and destroying realm, in which the strong and the subtle and the charming and the magnetic were apt to be victors, and the weak and the homely and the ignorant and the dull were apt to be deprived of any interesting share, not because of any innate depravity but rather because of the lacks by which they were handicapped and which they could not possibly overcome. Furthermore, there were other phases which I had previ- ously scarcely suspected. The race, if you please, was to the swift, and the battle to the strong. All great successes, as I was beginning to discover for myself, were relatively gifts, the teachings of the self-helpers and the virtue mongers to the contrary notwithstanding. Artists, singers, actors, police- men, statesmen, generals, were born, not made. Sunday school maxims, outside of the narrowest precincts, did not apply. People might preach one thing on Sunday or in the bosom of their families or in the meeting places of conven- tional social groups, but they did not practise them excep under compulsion, particularly in the stores and wholesah Theodore Dreiser (houses and the marts of trade and exchange. Mark the phrase j"under compulsion." I admit a vast compulsion which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or impulses of individuals. That compulsion springs from the settling processes of forces, which we do not in the least understand, over which we have no control, and in whose grip we are as grains of dust or sand, blown hither and thither, for what pur- pose we cannot even suspect. Politics, as I soon found (work- ing as a newspaper man and otherwise), was a low mess; re- ligion, both as to its principles and its practitioners, a ghastly fiction based on sound and fury, signifying nothing ; trade was a seething war in which the less subtle and the less swift or strong went under, while the more subtle succeeded; the pro- fessions were largely gathering places of weaklings, medi- ocrities or mercenaries, to be bought by, or sold to, the highest bidder. The individual, as I found, was trying to do one thing : make himself happy, principally. Life was plainly trying to do another, or at least what it was doing involved no great concern for the welfare of any particular individual. He might live ; he might die ; he might be well fed ; he might be hungry; he might accidentally, or by taking thought, ally him- self with successful movements, or he might inherently, by some incapacity or fatality of disposition, involve himself in the drifts toward failure; he might be weak; he might be strong ; he might be wise ; he might be dull or narrow. Life in the large threshing sense in which we see it to move about us cared no whit for him. Why so many failures? I was constantly asking myself. Why so many stores closed for want of business? So many fires? So many cyclones? So many destroying epidemics? So many failures in health or in trade or by reason of vice or crime? So many, many individ- uals going down into the limbo of nothingness or failure, so ^ew attaining to that vast and lonesome supremacy which all Life, Art and America were seeking? Why? Why? I persistently asked myself, and I have yet to find the answer in any current code of morale or ethics or the dogma of any religion. / However, it is not a picture of my own mental development that I am trying to put forward; rather one of life. My conl- cern is with the mental and critical standards of America as they exist today, and of England, from which they seem to be derived. England — the home of bourgeois art and bour- geois accomplishment. The average American, as I have said before, has such an odd, such a naive conception of what the world is like, what it is that is taking place under his eyes and under the sun. If you should chance to consult a Methodist, a Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, or any other current American sectarian, on this subject, you would find (which, after all, is a dull thing to point out at this day and date) that his concep- tion of the things which he sees about him is bounded by what he was taught in his Sunday school or his church, or what he has stored up or gathered from the conventions of his native town. (His native town! Kind heaven!) And, although the world has stored up endless treasuries of knowledge in regard to itself chemically, sociologically, historically, philosophi- cally — still the millions and millions who tramp the streets and occupy the stores and fill the highways and byways, and the fields, and the tenements of the city, have no faintest knowl- edge of this, or of anything else that can be said to be intel- lectually "doing." They live in theories and isms, and under codes dictated by a church or a state or an order of society, which has no least regard for or relationship to their natural mental development. The darkest side of democracy, like that ■"Of autocracies, is that it permits the magnetic and the cunning ahd the unscrupulous among the powerful individuals, to sway vast masses of the mob, not so much to their own imme- diate destruction as to the curtailment of their natural privii^^ Theodore Dreiser I'eges and the ideas which they should be allowed to entertain if they could think at all, and, incidentally, to the annoying and sometimes undoing of individuals who have the truest brain interests of the race at heart — ^Videl Giordano Bruno! Jan Huss! Savonarola 1 Tom Paine! Walt Whitman! Edgar Allan Poe! For, after all, as I have pointed out somewhere, the great^. business of life and mind is life. We are here, I talce it, not merely to moon and vegetate, but to do a little thinking about this state in which we find ourselves. It is perfectly legiti- mate, all priests and theories and philosophies to the contrary notwithstanding, to go back, in so far as we may, to the pri- mary sources of thought, i. e., the visible scene, the actions and thoughts of people, the movements of nature and its chem- ical and physical subtleties, in order to draw original and radical conclusions for ourselves. The great business of an individual, if he has any time after struggling for life and a reasonable amount of entertainment or sensory satiation, should be this very thing. [A man, if he can, should question the things that he sees — not some things, but everything — stand, as it were, in the center of this whirling storm of con- tradiction which we know as life, and ask of it its source and its import. Else why a brain at all? If only one could induce a moderate number of individuals, out of all that pass this way and come no more, apparently, to pause and think about life and take an individual point of view, the freedom and the individuality and the interest of the world might, I fancy, be greatly enhanced. We complain of the world as dull, at times. If it is so, lack of thinking by individuals is the reason. But to ask the poor, half-equipped mentality of the mass to think, to be individual — ^what an anachronism! You might as well ask of a rock to move, or a tree to fly. Nevertheless, here in America, by reason of an idealistic constitution which is largely a work of art and not a workable Life, Art and America system, you see a nation dedicated to so-called intellectua]^ and spiritual freedom, but actually devoted with an almost I bee-like industry to the gathering and storing and articulation and organization and use of purely material things. In spite ' of all our base-drum announcement of our servitude to the ' intellectual ideals of the world (copied mostly, by the way, from England) no nation has ever contributed less, philo- sophically or artistically or spiritually, to the actual develop- ment of the intellect and the spiritrj'I shall have more to say concerning this later on. We have invented many things, it is true, which have relieved man from the crushing weight of a too-grinding toil, and this perhaps may be the sole mis- sion of America in the world and the universe, its destiny, its end. Personally, I think it is not a half bad thing to have done, and the submarine and the flying machine and the ar- mored dreadnought, no less than the sewing machine and the cotton gin and the binder and the reaper and the cash regis- ter and the trolley car and the telephone, may, in the end, or perhaps already have, proved as significant in breaking the chains of physical and mental slavery of man as anything else. I do not know. One thing I do know is that America seems profoundly interested in these things, to the exclusion of anything else. It has no time, you might almost say, no taste, to stop and con- template life in the large, from an artistic or a philosophic point of view. Yet, after all, when all the machinery for lessening man's burdens has been invented, and all the safe- guards for his preservation completed and possibly shattered by forces too deep or superior for his cunning, may not a phrase, a line of poetry, or a single act of some half forgotten tragedy be all that is left of what we now see or dream of as materially perfect? For, after all, is it not a thought alone, of many famous and powerful things that have already gone, that alone endures — a thought conveyed by art as a medium? 8 Theodore Dreiser But let me not become too remote or too fine-spun in my conception of the ultimate significance of art itself. The point which I wish to make here is just this: {That in a land so devoted to the material, although dedicated by its constitution to the ideal, the condition of art and intellectual freedom is certainly anomalous^ Your trade and your trust builder, most obviously dominant in America at this time, is of all people most indifferent to, or most unconscious of, the ultimate and pressing claims of mind and spirit as expressed by art. If you doubt this, you have only to look about you to see for what purposes, to what end, the increment of men of wealth and material power in America is devoted. We have some- thing like twenty-five hundred colleges and schools and insti- tutions of various kinds, largely furthered by the money of American men of wealth, and all devoted to the development of the mental equipment of man, so we are told, yet all set with the most flinty firmness against anything which is related to truly radical investigation, or thought, or action, or art. As a matter of fact, in spite of the American constitution and the American oratorical address of all and sundry occa- sions, the average American school, college, university, insti- tution, is very much against the development of the individual in the true sense of that word. What it really wants is not- an individual, but an automatic copy of some altruistic and impossible ideal, which has been formulated here and in Eng- land, under the domination of Christianity. This is literally true. I defy you to read any college or university prospectus or address or plea, which concerns the purposes or the ideals of these institutions, and not agree with me. They are not after individuals, they are after types or schools of individuals, all to be very much alike, all to be like themselves. And what type? Listen. I know of an American college professor in one of our successful state universities who had this to say of the male graduates of his institution, after having watched Life, Art and America the output for a number of years : "They are all right, quite satisfactory as machines for the production of material wealth or for the maintenance of certain forms of professional skill, now very useful to the world, but as for having ideas of their own, being creators or men with the normal impulses and pas- sions of manhood, they do not fulfill the requisite in any respect. They are little more than types, machines, made in the image and likeness of their college. They do not think; they cannot think, because they are bound hard and fast by the iron band of convention. They are moral young beings, Christian be- ings, model beings, but they are not men in the creative sense, and by far the large majority will never do a single original thing until by chance or necessity the theories and the conven- tions imposed or generated by their training and their sur- roundings are broken, and they become free, independent, self thinking individuals." I know of one woman's college, for instance, an American institution of the very highest standing which, since its incep- tion, has sent forth into life some thousands of graduates and post graduates, to battle life as they may for individual su- premacy or sensory comfort. They are, or were, supposed to be individuals, capable of individual thought, procedure, in- vention, development, yet out of all of them, not one has ever even entered upon any creative or artistic labor of any kind. Not one. (Write me for the name of the college, if you wish. ) There is not a chemist, a physiologist, a botanist, a biologist, an historian, a philosopher, an artist, of any kind or repute, among them, not one. No one of them has attained to even passing repute in these fields. They are secretaries to corpora- tions, teachers, missionaries, college librarians, educators in any of the scores of pilfered meanings that may be attached to that much abused word. They are curators, directors, keepers. They are not individuals in the true sense of that word; they have not been taught to think, they are not free. They do not 10 Theodore Dreiser invent, lead, create. They only copy or take care of, yet they are graduates of this college and its theory, mostly ultra con- ventional or, worse yet, anaemic, and glad to w^ear its collar, to clank the chains of its ideas or ideals — automatons in a social scheme whose last and final detail was outlined to them in the classrooms of their alma mater. That, to me, is one phase, amusing enough, of intellectual freedom in America. But the above is a mere detail in any chronicle or picture of the social or intellectual state of the United States. No country in the world, at least none that I know anything about, has such a peculiar, such a seemingly fierce determination, to make the Ten Commandments work. It would be amusing if it were not pitiful, their faith in these binding religious ideals. I, for one, have never been able to make up my mind whether this springs from the zealotry of the Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock, or whether it is indigenous to the soil (which I doubt when I think of the Indians who preceded the whites), or whether it is a product of the federal consti- tution, compounded by such idealists as Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, and the more or less religious and political dreamers of the p re-constitutional days. Certain it is that no profound moral idealism animated the French in Canada, tbe Dutch in New York, the Swedes in New Jersey, or the mixed French and English in the extreme south and New Orleans. The first shipload of white women that was ever brought to America was sold, almost at so much a pound. They were landed at Jamestown. The basis of all the first large fortunes was laid, to speak plainly, in graft — the most outrageous con- cessions obtained abroad. The history of our relations with the American Indians is sufficient to lay any claim to financial or moral virtue or worth in the white men who settled this country. We debauched, then robbed and murdered them. There is no other conclusion to be drawn from the facts cov- ering that relationship as set down in any history worthy of II Life, Art and America the name. In regard to the development of our land, our canals, our railroads, and the vast organizations supplying our present day necessities, their history is a complex of perjury, robbery, false witness, extortion, and indeed every crime to >which avarice, greed and ambition are heir. If you do not believe this, examine at your leisure the various congressional and state legislative investigations which have been held on an average of every six months since the government was founded, and see for yourself. The cunning and unscrupu- lousness of American brains can be matched against any the world has ever known, not even excepting the English. But an odd thing in connection with this financial and social criminality is that it has been consistently and regularly ac companied, outwardly at least, by a religious and a sex puri- tanism which would be scarcely believable if it were not true. I do not say that the robbers and thieves who did so much to build up our great commercial and social structures were in themselves inwardly or outwardly always religious or puri- tanically moral from the sex point of view, although in regard to the latter, they most frequently made a show of so being. But I do say this, that the communities and the states and the nation in which they were committing their depredations have been individually and collectively, in so far as the writ- ten, printed and acted word are concerned, and in pictures and music, militantly pure and religious during all the time that this has been going forward under their eyes, and, to a certain extent, with their political consent. Why? I have a vague feeling that it is the American of Anglo-Saxon origin only who has been most vivid in his excitement over religion and morals where the written, printed, acted, or painted word was concerned, yet who, at the same time, and perhaps for this very reason, was failing or deliberately refusing to see, the contrast which his ordinary and very human actions pre- sented to all this. Was he a hypocrite? Oh, well! — is he 12 Theodore Dreiser one? I hate to think it, but he certainly acts the part exceed- ingly well. Either he is that or a fool — take your choice. Your American of Anglo-Saxon or any other origin is actually no better, spiritually or morally, than any other creature of this earth, be he Turk or Hindu or Chinese, except from a materially constructive or wealth-breeding point of view, but for some odd reason or another, he thinks he is. The only real difference is that, cast out or spewed out by conditions over which he had no control elsewhere, he chanced to fall into a land overflowing with milk and honey. Nature in America was, and still is, kind to the lorn foreigner seek- ing a means of subsistence, and he seems to have immediately attributed this to three things: First, his inherent capacity to dominate and control wealth; second, the especial favor of God to him; third, to his superior and moral state (due, of course, to his possession of wealth). These three things, uncorrected as yet by any great financial pressure, or any great natural or world catastrophe, have served to keep the American in his highly romantic state of self deception. li& still thinks that he is a superior spiritual and moral being, infinitely better than the creatures of any other land, and nothing short of a financial cataclysm, which will come with the pressure of population on resources, will convince him that he is not. But that he will yet be convinced is a certainty. You need not fear. Leave it to nature. One of the interesting phases of this puritanism or pharisee- ism is his attitude toward women and their morality and their purity. If ever a people has refined eroticism to a greater degree than the American, I am not aware of it. Owing to a theory or the doctrinaire acceptance of the Mary legend (Mary-olotry, no less), the good American, capable of the same gross financial crimes previously indicated, has been able to look upon most women, but more particularly those above him in the social scale, as considerably more than 13 Life, Art and America human — angelic, no less, and possessed of qualities the like of which are not to be found in any breathing being, man, wom- an, child, or animal. It matters not that his cities and towns, like those of any other nation, are rife with sex ; that in each one are specific and often large areas devoted to Eros or Venus, or both. While maintaining them, he is still blind to their existence or import. He or his boys or his friends go — but—. Only a sex blunted nature or race such as the Anglo-Saxon could have built up any such asinine theory as this. The purity, the sanctity, the self-abnegation, the delicacy of women — how these qualities have been exaggerated and dinned into our ears, until at last the average scrubby non-reasoning male, quite capable of visiting the gardens of Venus, or taking a girl off the street, is no more able to clearly visualize the creature before him than he is the central wilds of Africa which he has never seen. A princess, a goddess, a divine mother or creative principle, all the virtues, all the perfec- tions, no vices, no weaknesses, no errors — some such hodge- podge as this has come to be the average Anglo-Saxon, or at least American, conception of the average American woman. I do not say that a portion of this illusion is not valuable — I think it is. But as it stands now, she is too good to be true : a paragon, a myth! Actually, she doesn't exist at all as he has been taught to imagine her. She is nothing more than a two-legged biped like the rest of us, but in consequence of this delusion sex itself, being a violation of this paragon, has become a crime. We enter upon the earth, it is true, in a none too artistic manner (conceived in iniquity and born in sin, is the biblical phrasing of it) , but all this has long since been glozed over — ignored— and to obviate its brutality as much as possible, the male has been called upon to purify himself in thought and deed, to avoid all private speculation as to women and his relationship to them, and, much more H Theodore Dreiser than that, to avoid all public discussion, either by word of mouth or the printed page. To think of women or to describe them as anything less than the paragon previously commented upon, has become, by this process, not only a sin — it is a shameful infraction of the moral code, no less. Women are too good, the sex relation- ship too vile a thing, to be mentioned or even thought of. We must move in a mirage of illusion. We must not know what we really do. We must trample fact under foot and give fancy, in the guise of our so-called better natures, free rein. How this must aflfect or stultify the artistic and creative faculties of the race itself must be plain. Yet that is exactly where we stand today, ethically and spiritually, in regard to sex and women, and that is what is the matter with American social life, letters and art. I do not pretend to say that this is not a workable and a satisfactory code in case any race or nation chooses to follow it, but I do say it is deadening to the artistic impulse, and I mean it. Imagine a puritan or a moralist attempting anything in art, which is nothing if not a true reflection of insight into life! Imagine I And contrast this moral or art narrowness with his commercial, or financial, or agricultural freedom and sense, and note the difference. In regard to all the latter, he is cool, sceptical, level-headed, understanding, natural — con- sequently well developed in those fields. In regard to this other, he is illusioned, theoretic, religious. In consequence, he has no power, except for an occasional individual who may rise in spite of these untoward conditions (to be frowned upon) to understand, much less picture, life as it really is. Artistically, intellectually, philosophically, we are weaklings ; financially, and in all ways commercial we are very power- ful. So one-sided has been our development that in this latter respect we are almost giants. Strange, almost fabulous creatures, have been developed here by this process, men so 15 Life, Art and America singularly devoid of a rounded human nature that they have become freaks in this one direction — that of money getting. I refer to Rockefeller, Gould, Sage, Vanderbilt the first, H. H. Rogers, Carnegie, Frick, Strong in all but this one capacity, the majority of our great men stand forth as true human rarities, the like of which has scarcely ever been seen before. America could be described as the land of Bottom the Weaver. And by Bottom I mean the tradesman or manufac- turer who by reason of his enthusiasm for the sale of paints or powder or threshing machines or coal, has accumulated wealth and, in consequence and by reason of the haphazard privileges of democracy, has strayed into a position of coun- sellor, or even dictator, not in regard to the things about which he might readily be supposed to know, but about the many things about which he would be much more likely not to know: art, science, philosophy, morals, public policy in gen- eral. You recall him, of course, in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," unconscious of his furry ears and also that he does not know how to play the lion's part — that it is more difficult than mere roaring. Here he is now, in America, enthroned as a lion, and in his way he is an epitome of the Anglo-Saxon temperament. All merchants, judges, lawyers, priests, poli- ticians — ^what a goodly company of Bottoms they are. Solidi- fied, they are Bottom to the life. Bottom is so wise in his own estimation. He never once suspects his furry ears or that he is not a perfect actor in the role of the lion — or (if you will take it for what it is meant) the arts. He is just a dull weaver, really, made by this dream of our constitution ("an exposition of sleep" come upon him) into a roaring lion — in his own estimation. No one must say that Bottom is not: he will be driven out of the country — deported or exiled. No one must presume to practise the arts save as Bottom understands them. If you do, presto, there is i6 Theodore Dreiser his henchman Comstock and all Comstockery to take you into custody. Men who have come here from foreign shores (England excepted) have been amazed at Bottom's ears and bis presumption in passing upon what is a lion's part in life. Indeed he is the Anglo-Saxon temperament per- sonified. He is convinced that liberty was not made for Oberon or Peaseblossom or Cobweb or Mustard, but for bishops and executives and wholesale grocers and men who have become vastly rich canning tomatoes or sell- ing oil. We must be "marvelous furry about the face" and do things his way, to be free. The great desire of Bottom is for all of us to have furry ears and long ones and to believe that he is the greatest actor in the world. He is bewildered by a world that will not play Pyramus his way. Quince, Snug, Flute, Snout, and Starveling (all those who came over with him in the Mayflower) agree that he is a great actor, but there are others, and Bottom is convinced that these others are in error — trying to wreck that dream, the American Con- stitution, which brought this "exposition of sleep" upon him and made him into a lion — "marvelous furry about the face" and with great ears. Alas, alas 1 for art in America. It has a hard, stubby row to hoe. But my quarrel is not with America as a comfortable in- dustrious atmosphere in which to move and have one's being, but largely because it is no more than that — because it tends to become a dull, conventionalized, routine, material world, duller even that its reputed mother, sacred England. We are drifting, unless most of the visible signs are deceiving, into the clutches of a commercial oligarchy whose mental stand- ards outside of trade are so puerile as to be scarcely worth discussing. Contemplate, if you please, what has happened to one of the shibboleths or bulwarks of our sacred liberties and intellectual freedom, i. e., the newspaper, under the dominance 17 Life, Art and America of trade. Look at it. I have not time here to stop and set forth seriatim all the charges that have been made, and in the main thoroughly substantiated, against the American news- paper. But consider for yourselves the newspapers which you know and read. How much, I ask you, if you are in trade, do the newspapers you know, know about trade? How much actual truth do they tell? How far could you follow their trade judgment or understanding? And if you are a member of any profession, how much reported professional knowledge or news, as presented by a newspaper, can you rely on? If a newspaper reported a professional man's judg- ment or dictum in regard to any important professional fact, how fully would you accept it without other corroborative testimony? You are a play-goer: do you believe the newspaper dramatic critics? You are a student of literature: do you accept the mouthings of their literary critics or even look to them for advice? You are an artist or a lover of art: do you follow the newspapers for anything more than the barest intelligence as to the whereabouts of anything artistic? I doubt it. And in regard to politics, finance, social movements and social affairs, are they not actually the darkest, the most misrepre- sentative, frequently the most biased and malicious guides in the world of the printed word? Take their mouthings concerning ethics and morals alone and contrast them, if you please, with their private policy or their financial connections — the forces by which they are directed, editorially and other- wise. I am not speaking of all newspapers, but never mind the exception. It is always unimportant in mass conditions, anyhow. Newspaper criticism, like newspaper leadership, has already long since come to be looked upon by the informed and intelligent as little more than the mouthings or bellow- ings of mercenaries or panderers to trade, or, worse still, rank incompetents. The newspaper man, per se, either does not i8 Theodore Dreiser know or cannot help himself. The newspaper publisher is very glad of this and uses his half intelligence or inability to further his own interests. Politicians, administrations, de- partment stores, large interests and personalities of various kinds, use or control or compel newspapers to do their bid- ding. This is a severe indictment to make against the press in general. Is it not literally true? Do you not, of your own knowledge, know it to be so? Take again the large, the almost dominant religious and commercial organizations of America. What relationship, if any, do they bear to a free mental development, a refined taste, a subtle understanding, art or life in its poetic or tragic moulds, its drift, its character? Would you personally look to the Methodist, or the Presbyterian, or the Catholic, or the Baptist church to further individualism, or freedom of thought, or directness of mental action, or art in any form? Do not they really ask of all their adherents that they lay aside this freedom in favor of the reported word or dictum of a fabled, a non-historic, an imaginary ruler, of the uni- verse? Think of it. And they are among the powerful, constructive, and controlling elements in government — in this government, to be accurate — dedicated and presumably de- voted to individual liberty, not only of so-called conscience, but of constructive thought and art. And our large corporations, with their dominant and con- trolling captains of industry, so-called. What about their relationship to individuality, the freedom of the individual to think for himself — to grow along constructural lines? Take, for instance, the tobacco trust, the oil trust, the milk trust, the coal trust — in what way, do you suppose, do they help? Are they actively seeking a better code of ethics, a wider historic or philosophic perspective, a more delicate art perception for the individual, or are they definitely and permanently con- cerned with the customary bludgeoning tactics of trade, piling 19 Life, Art and America up fortunes out of which they are to be partially bled later by pseudo art collectors and swindling dealers in antiques and so-called historic art and literature? Of current life and its accomplishments, what do they actually know? Yet this is a democracy. Here, as in every other realm of the world, the individual is permitted, compelled, to seek his own mate- rial and mental salvation as best he may. The trouble with a democracy as opposed to an autocracy, with a line of titled idlers permitted the gift of leisure and art indulgence, is that there is no central force or group to foster art, to secure letters and art in their inalienable rights, to make of superior thought a noble and a sacred thing. I am not saying that democracy will not yet produce such a central force or group. I believe it can and will. I believe when the time arrives it may prove to be better than any form of hereditary autocracy. But I am talking about the mental, the social,' the artistic condition of America as it is today. To me it is a thing for laughter, if not for tears : one hun- dred million Americans, rich (a fair percentage of them, any- how) beyond the dreams of avarice, and scarcely a sculptor, a poet, a singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician, worthy of the name. One hundred and forty years (almost two hundred, counting the Colonial days) of the most prosperous social conditions, a rich soil, incalculable deposits of gold, silver, ,and precious and useful metals and fuels of all kinds, a land amazing in its mountains, its streams, its valley prospects, its wealth-yielding powers, and now its tremendous cities and far-flung facilities for travel and trade, and yet contemplate it. Artists, poets, thinkers, where are they? Run them over in your mind. Has it produced a single philosopher of the first rank — a Spencer, a Nietzsche, a Schopenhauer, a Kant? Do -I hear someone offering Emerson as an equivalent? or James? Has it produced a historian of the force of either Macauley or Grote or Gibbon? A novelist of the rank of 20 Theodore Dreiser Turgenev, de Maupassant, or Flaubert? A scientist of the standing of Crooks or Roentgen or Pasteur? A critic of the insight and force of Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the de Goncourts? A dramatist the equivalent of Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Haupt- mann, Brieux? An actor, since Booth, of the force of Coquelin, Sonnenthal, Forbes-Robertson, or Sarah Bern- hardt? Since Whitman, one poet, Edgar Lee Masters. In painting, a Whistler, an Inness, a Sargent. Who else? (And two of these shook the dust of our shores forever.) Inventors, yes. By the hundreds, one might almost say by the thousands. Some of them amazing enough, in all conscience, world figures, and enduring for all time. But of what relationship to art — the supreme freedom of the mind? I have been asked to comment on the moral, the social, drift of America, as this relates itself to mental freedom. Look at it for yourself. What is there to say really? What? The most significant and, to me, discouraging manifesta- tion in connection with the United States today, is the ten- dency to even narrower and more puritanic standards than have obtained in the past. In all conscience, up to this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventeen, they have been bad enough. As a matter of fact, America, in its hundred years of life, has not even reached the intellectual maturity that goes in individual cases with a stripling of eighteen. I am constantly astonished by the thousands of men, exceed- ingly capable in some mechanical or narrow technical sense, whose world or philosophic vision is that of a child. As a nation, we accept and believe naively in such impossible things. I am not thinking alone of the primary tenets of all religions, which are manifestly based on nothing at all, and which millions of Americans, along with the humbler classes of other countries, accept, but rather of those sterner truths which life itself teaches — the unreliability of human nature; the crass chance which strikes down and destroys our finest 21 Life, Art and America dreams ; the fact that man in all his relations is neither good nor evil, but both. The American, by some hocus pocus of atavism, has seem- ingly borrowed or retained from lower English middle-class puritans all their fol de rol notions about making human nature perfect by fiat or edict — the written word, as it were, which goes with all religions. So, although by reason of the coarsest and most brutal methods, we, as a nation, have built up one of the most interesting and domineering oligarchies in the world, we are still by no means aware of the fact. All men, in the mind of the unthinking American, are still free and equal. They have in themselves certain inalienable rights ; what they are, when you come to test them, no human being can discover. Your so-called rights disappear like water before a moving boat. They do not exist. Life here, as elsewhere, comes down to the brutal methods of nature itself. The rich strike the poor at every turn ; the poor defend themselves and further their lives by all the tricks which stark necessity can conceive. No inalienable right keeps the average cost of living from rising steadily, while most of the salaries of our idealistic Americans are stationary. No in- alienable right has ever yet prevented the strong from either tricking or browbeating the weak. And, although by degrees the average American everywhere is feeling more and more keenly the sharpening struggle for existence, yet his faith in his impossible ideals is as fresh as ever. God will 'save the good American, and seat him at His right hand on the Golden Throne. On earth the good American is convinced that the narrower and more colorless his life here the greater his opportunity for a more glorious life hereafter. His pet theory is that man is made useful and successful and constructive — a perfect man, in short — by the kinds and numbers of things he is not permitted to do or think or say. A pale, narrow, utterly 22 Theodore Dreiser restrained life, according to his theory, is the perfect one. If one accepted St. James's version and kept utterly unspotted by the world, entirely out of contact with it, he would be the perfect American. Indeed, ever since the Mayflower landed, and the country began to grow westward, we have been con- vinced that we were destined to make the Ten Command- ments, in all their arbitrary perfection, work. One might show readily enough that America attained its amazing posi- tion in life by reason of the fact that, along with boundless , opportunities, the Ten Commandments did not and do not work, but what would be the use? With one hand the naive American takes and executes with all the brutal insistence of nature itself; with the other he writes glowing platitudes concerning brotherly love, virtue, purity, truth, etc., etc. A part of this right or left hand tendency, as the case might be, is seen in the constant desire of the American to reform something. No country in the world, not even England, the mother of fol de rol reforms, is so prolific in these frail ven- tures as this great country of ours. In turn we have had cam- paigns for the reform of the atheist, the drunkard, the lecher, the fallen woman, the buccaneer financier, the drug fiend, the dancer, the theatregoer, the reader of novels, the wearer of low-neck dresses and surplus jewelry — in fact, every human taste and frivolity, wherever sporadically it has chanced to manifest itself with any interesting human force. Your re- former's idea is that any human being, to be a successful one, must be a pale spindling sprout, incapable of any vice or crime. And all the while the threshing sea of life is sounding in his ears. The thief, the lecher, the drunkard, the fallen woman, the greedy, the inordinately vain, as in all ages past, pass by his door, and are not the whit less numerous for the unending campaigns which have been launched to save them. In other words, human nature is human nature, but your American cannot be made to believe it. 23 Life, Art and America He will not give up the illusion which was piled safely in the hold of the Mayflower when it set sail. He is going to reform man and the world willy nilly, and, while- in his rampant idealism he is neglecting to build up a suitable army and navy wherewith to defend himself, he is busy propagating little cults whereby man is to be made less vigorous, more the useless anaemic thing that he has in mind. Personally, my quarrel is with America's quarrel with original thought. It is so painful to me to see one after another of our alleged reformers tilting Don Quixote-like at the giant windmillis of fact. We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theatres, no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no •speech even, which will in any way contravene his limited view of life. A few years ago it was the humble dealer in liquor whose life was anathemetized, and whose property: was descended upon with torches, axes and bombs. Now comes prohibition. A little later, our cities growing and the sec- tions devoted to the worship of Venus becoming more mani- fest, the Vice Crusader was bred, and we had the spectacle of whole areas of fallen women scattered to the four winds, and allowed to practise separately what they could not do collectively. Then came Mr. Comstock, vindictive, persis- tent, and with a nose and a taste for the profane and erotic, such as elsewhere has not been equaled since. Pictures, books, the theatre, the dance, the studio— all came under his watch- ful eye. During the twenty or thirty years in which he acted as a United States Postoffice Inspector, he was, because of his dull charging against things which he did not rightly under- stand, never out of the white light of publicity which he so greatly craved. One month it would be a novel by D'Annun- zio; another, a set of works by Balzac or de Maupassant, found in the shade of some grovelly bookseller's shop; the 24 Theodore Dreiser humble photographer attempting a nude; the painter who allowed his reverence for Raphael to carry him too far; the poet who attempted a recrudescence of Don Juan in modern iambics, was immediately seized upon and hauled before an equally dull magistrate, there to be charged with his offense and to be fined accordingly. All this is being continued with emphasis. Then came the day of the White Slave Chasers, and now no American city, and no backwoods Four Corners, however humble, is complete without a vice commission of some kind, or at least a local agent or representative, charged with the duty of keeping the art, the literature, the press, and the private lives of all those at hand up to that standard of per- fection which only the dull can set for themselves. Several years ago, when the White Slave question was at its whitest heat, the problem of giving expression to its funda- mental aspects was divided between raiding plays which attempted to show the character of the crime in too graphic a manner, and licensing those which appealed to the intelli- gence of those who were foremost in the crusade. Thus we had the spectacle of an uncensored, but nevertheless approved, ten-reel film showing more details of the crime and better methods of securing white slaves, than any other production of the day, running undisturbed to packed houses all over the country, while two somewhat more dramatic, but far less effective distributors of information in the way of plays were successfully harried from city to city and finally withdrawn. Shakespeare has been ordered from the schools in some of the states. A production of "Antony and Cleopatra" has been raided in Chicago. Japanese prints of a high art value, intended for the seclusion of a private collection, have been seized and the most valuable of them held to be destroyed. By turns, an artistic fountain to Heine in New York, loan exhibits of paintings in Denver, Kansas City, and elsewhere, scores of 25 Life, Art and America books by Stevenson, James Lane Allen, Frances H. Burnett, have been attacked, not only, as in the case of the latter, with the invisible weapons of the law, as might be expected, but, in regard to the former, with actual axes. A male dancer of repute and some artistic ability, has been raided publicly by the Vice Crusaders for his shameless exposure of his person! No play, no picture, no book, no public or private jubilation of any kind, is complete any more without its vice attack. To me this sort of thing is dull, and bespeaks the. low state to which our mental activities have fallen. When it comes to the matter of serious letters it is the worst. In New York a literary reign of terror has been and is now being attempted. The publisher of Mr. D. H. Lawrence's latest novel is warned before he brings it out that he will be prose- cuted — a work that probably has no more defect than being intelligent and true. Similarly, Mr. Przybyszewski's "Homo Sapiens" — a by no means pornographic work — ^was at once seized on its appearance, and the publishers frightened into withdrawing it. This was true of "Hagar Ravelly," "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," "Sapho," "Jude the Obscure," "Rose of Dutchers Cooley," "A Lady of Quality," "A Summer in Arcady," and indeed scores of others. Imagine banning a book like "A Summer in Arcady" from the public libraries! And now "The Sexual Question," by the eminent August Forel, has been banned also. Think of it — the work of a scientist of Forel's attainments being banned ! This sort of interference with serious letters is, to me, the worst and most corrupting form of espionage which is con- ceivable to the human mind. It plumbs the depths of ignor- ance and intolerance; if not checked, it can and will dam initiative and inspiration at the source. Life, if it is anything at all, is a thing to be observed, studied, interpreted. We cannot know too much about it, because as yet we know noth- ing. It is our one great realm of discovery. The artist, if 26