Outside of his novels Theodore Dreiser has often shown himself an original thinker, and, even when his philosophy has lacked originality, he has made up for it by the strength of his convictions. His outlook on life is as little cheerful as that of Voltaire in “Candide” or Anatole France in “Penguin Island.” The true realist, like a true psychologist, is a born pessimist. Only the ignorant can be blind to the human tragedy. Let us praise Dreiser for seeing the ugly side of life without altogether losing faith in it. Experience has taught him many a bitter lesson as to the place of man in the universe. One cannot be a reporter and still sing every day Browning’s famous hymn to optimism: The year is at the spring, The day is at the morn, God’s in his heaven; All’s right with the world. Even a self-satisfied poet, at ease under the beautiful Italian sky, can forget himself now and then and blaspheme. Not so Theodore Dreiser. This is a sober and gloomy portrait of life, such as Lucretius used to paint it: Common dust swept into our atmosphere makes our beautiful sunsets and blue sky. 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 petrification. 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? Are not the processes by which they are produced or those by which they live (the Chicago slaughter-houses, for instance), stark, relentless, brutal, shameful even?--life living on life, the preying of one on another, the compulsory ageing of all, the hungers, thirsts, destroying losses and pains.[18]