and act, but the endless mystery out
of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them
that it is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal
and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a
finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by
college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in
"Pot-Bouille"--in Nietzsche's phrase, for "the delight to stink"--then
surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been
underestimated. What is the fact? The fact is that Dreiser's attitude of
mind, his manner of reaction to the phenomena he represents, the whole
of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from Zola,
Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the
midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of
doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point
of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it;
here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books,
and it might be:

[Greek:

_Io geneai broton,
Hos umas isa chai to meden
Zosas enarithmo._

]

If you protest against that as too harsh for Christians and college
professors, right-thinkers and forward-lookers, then you protest against
"Oedipus Rex."[26]

As for the animal behaviour prattle of the learned head-master, it
reveals, on the one hand, only the academic fondness for seizing upon
high-sounding but empty phrases and using them to alarm the populace,
and on the other hand, only the academic incapacity for observing facts
correctly and reporting them honestly. The truth is, of course, that the
behaviour of such men as Cowperwood and Witla and of such women as
Carrie and Jennie, as Dreiser describes it, is no more merely animal
than the behaviour of such acknowledged and undoubted human beings as
Woodrow Wilson and Jane Addams. The whole point of the story of Witla,
to take the example which seems to concern the horrified watchmen most,
is this: that his life is a bitter conflict between the animal in him
and the aspiring soul, between the flesh and the spirit, between what
is weak in him and what is strong, between what is base and what is
noble. Moreover, the good, in the end, gets its hooks into the bad: as
we part from Witla he is actually bathed in the tears of remorse, and
resolved to be a correct and godfearing man. And what ha