Theodore Dreiser

“ He is a creator of spectacles, a slinger of thunder-bolts, a breather of fire, a master of cataclysm. His, or Its, least breath is storm. Its sigh is earthquake or orbital derangement. No attributes such as man can conceive can apply—neither good nor evil, virtue or its opposite—for these apply only as mild suggestions at moments of equation in one minor part of the great whole or another. Our God is tragedy and comedy, terror and delight. He is limitless opportunity and endless opposition and destruction, for His way is extremes in equation, and nothing more and nothing less. ”

“ Lay them out in hundreds—in millions—to be blown whithersoever the wind listeth, to poverty, to death, perchance even to fortune, a brief hour. Who cares? Not She. Only the ways of life must be kept fresh and new, the illusion of newness and vigor maintained. Only through new bright instruments will She work, and none other. A tasteful maid. In the blood-stream of your body are quadrillions of little entities—so many millions to the single blood drop—whose total destiny, apparently, is to your life about as yours is to the race—and no more. They hurry that you may live. ”

“ Better, indeed, a criminal, whole and exhibiting that self-sufficiency which the life impulse demands, than to have been injured in any worthy or even glorious contest. Rarely if ever, and never willingly, does Life obtrude upon our unwilling gaze a suggestion of the brevity of our own strength or charm, or present to the eye even a faint suggestion of the inscrutable and astounding and even wholesale cruelty of itself. Indeed, where Nature with her illusions has her way, pain, weariness and death are never to be accepted as the huge controlling facts that they are. ”

“ Yes, life is careful to do away with all evidences of age in the public places where it runs so gaily. The sick—are they here or in hospitals or darkened bedrooms? The maimed, the blind, the defective in any way—are they here, or hidden away in institutions where the young and the hopeful may not see? Life apparently resents them. It will not have its ways bestrewn by its discarded implements and shells. Out, out, since it is done with them. Away! There is much talk of charity and the beatitudes, but let one lose an arm, a leg, an eye, a hand. ”

“ And again—and this is the darkest thought of all—it, our personal Creator, assumed by the religionists at least to be so careful of our individual welfare, may be little more than the veriest tyro in so far as the larger and largest creative forces or impulses in the universe are concerned. Manifesting little or no interest in us, no more perhaps than is needful to its own welfare, it may be as little to the powers above it as are we to it. For who can guess whether the thing or power which makes man is the ultimate power or guiding force in so spacious a thing as the universe? ”

“ Now comes a band of wasp-like censors to put the finishing touches on a literature and an art that has struggled all too feebly as it is. Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau, each in turn was the butt and jibe of unintelligent Americans, until by now we are well nigh the laughing-stock of the world. Where is it to end? When will we lay aside our swaddling-clothes, enforced on us by ignorant, impossible puritans and their uneducated followers, and stand up free-thinking men and women? Life is to be learned as much from books and art as from life itself—almost more so, in my judgment. ”

“ Our bright morning sky has been overcast with something that was by no means foreseen by the charming and gracious idealists who framed our Constitution and, better yet, our ideals. America, ungracious as it may seem on the part of one who has prospered well enough in it, is neither so free nor so liberal as many imagined it would be. Our press, our school system, our laws, our political methods—do these today answer to the incisive aspiration which was characteristic, or at least was supposed to be characteristic, of the spirit of those who generated the American Republic? ”

“ We must move in a mirage of illusion; we must trample fact underfoot and give fancy, in the guise of our so-called better natures, free rein. How this must affect or stultify the artistic and creative faculties of the race itself must be plain, yet that is exactly where we stand to-day, ethically and spiritually, in regard to sex and women, and that is what is the matter with American social life, letters and art. Imagine a puritan or a moralist attempting anything in art, which is nothing if not a true reflection, emotional and intellectual, of insight into life! ”

“ But the darkest part of it is that aside from the small modicum of service which you may render at top speed and with the utmost enthusiasm, Nature has not the slightest care for you or yours. With the same cavalier air with which She provides a hundred drones for the single love-flight of the queen bee, all the failures to die, so She provides a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, that one—and only one—may think the necessary thought, invent the necessary machine, build the necessary bridge or lead the necessary army. ”

“ Sidereal space, as we know it, is said to be one welter of strangely flowing streams of rock and dust, a wretched mass made attractive only by some vast compulsory coalition into a star. Stars clash and blaze, and the whole great complicated system seems one erosive, chaffering, bickering effort, with here and there a tendency to stillness and petrifaction. This world as we know it, the human race and the accompanying welter of animals and insects, do they not, aside from momentary phases of delight and beauty, often strike you as dull, aimless, cruel, useless? ”

“ Every great business corporation, as we know, is built about the personality, the leadership, the autocracy, of one man. We hear of love of country, of putting the needs of the mass, one’s country—all countries—above that of one’s personal or private needs. There are noble examples no doubt (off-hand few occur to me) of unselfish public sacrifice of many, many private lives, but are they the rule or the exception? Does not the average individual now as heretofore consult his own interest, his advantage, his purse, his survival, his fame? ”

“ And, indeed, is not stark, threatening secrecy, non-moral force that it is, the thing which gives color if not joy to life and which lends surprise, uncertainty, fear and hence freedom from ennui to life, and, by contrast, hope and calculation, the greatest and most charming of all our gifts? For what game or sport, implying, as they do, friendly contest, would be worthy the name if it did not involve the element of chance or uncertainty, or, in other words, secrecy, to the extent that one cannot beforehand determine the outcome? ”

“ Attempts at world domination on the part of one individual and another have proved failures, as witness Darius, Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon, the Kaiser.
Yet theories and doxies wear thin with the course of time, and the “still, small voice” of one age is not the “still, small voice” of the next, strange as it may seem. At best, all we have is the individual, not always financial, by any means, or artistic, but one who has dreamed out something: music, a picture, poetry, a machine, a railroad, an empire—anything, in short, that man as race or nation can use or rejoice in. ”

“ A princess, a goddess, a divine mother or creative principle, all the virtues, all the perfections, 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, 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. ”

“ It is so painful to me to see one after another of our alleged reformers tilting Don Quixote-like at the giant windmills 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 theaters, 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. ”

“ What is true is that autocracy or single-headed government without genius and a love of humanity is closely allied, or very likely to be, to tyranny; whereas democracy or multiple-headed rotation in control is likely to prove even more dangerous where it is merely dull. It has not even the advantage of being spectacular and interesting. Whether the individual, thus protected against tyranny, is likely to prove a greater and more useful engine or mechanism for the development of more and better thought, more beautiful dreams and ideals than the world ever had before, remains to be seen. ”

“ It has no time, you might almost say, no taste, to stop and contemplate 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 safeguards for his preservation completed and possibly shattered by forces too deep or superior for his mechanical 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? ”

“ Abstractions and theories are good as games at which the human mind may play if it chooses, and whenever life becomes too severe for any group or part of it it is easy enough to invent a theory or abstraction which will then make it seem different. And this is almost invariably done, as witness all the impossible religions and theories that at one time and another have filled the world. Like chess or checkers, they furnish a diversion or relief to life-weary minds. If you have nothing better to do even a religion may be worth while. ”