This hero worship explains to us why Theodore Dreiser cannot refrain from feeling some admiration even for such authentic villains as his Frank Cowperwood. Biology and ethics play at the tug-of-war in his novels. He cannot accept the criminal, but neither can he condemn him without a mixed feeling of aversion and awe in the presence of his strength. The call-of-the-wild lures him as strongly as it does Jack London. He adores sheer force as an athlete does the sight of a perfect figure, without any admixture of moral responsibility. He adores life as what may be called the muscular display of passions. Without greed and lust he gives us to understand that there would be no dramatic pathos left in existence. So he wrote the epic of appetites unleashed. In his novels Society arrayed with moral codes, judges, policemen, jails and executioners plays the part of the Myrmidons in Homer. The men of pluck and daring, the grafters, the forgers, and the like, stand out like as many Achilles and Hectors. Passions and appetites, even those condemned by the code, are the keys to human life. The truest moments of life, although they may be the most tragic, are those athrill with a great passion. Life is a perpetually self-renovating process, the gushing-out of infinite forces hurled against all barriers.[24] This love of life as it is, along with Dreiser’s preference for the bio-chemical point of view, must also account for the treatment of the sexual problems in his books. Dreiser’s apparent cynicism on this point is again that of the biologist. To detect the mysteries of sex he does not need to turn to Doctor Freud. He brings everything to the surface. Like Whitman, he sings a pæan to life in all its works. His pagan odes to Life need only rhymes to be formal poems. Here is a hymn to the Vital Force which betrays the true poet: Life will not be boxed in boxes. It will not be wrapped and tied up with strings and set aside on a shelf to await a particular religious or moral use. As yet we do not understand life, we do not know what it is, what the laws are that govern it. At best we see ourselves hobbling along, responding to this dream and that lust and unable to compel ourselves to gainsay the fires and appetites and desires of our bodies and minds. Some of these, in some of us, strangely enough (and purely accidentally, of that I am convinced) conform to the current needs or beliefs of a given society; and if we should be so fortunate as to find ourselves in that society, we are by reason of these ideals, favorites, statesmen, children of fortune, poets of the race. On the other hand, others of us who do not and cannot conform (who are left-over phases of ancient streams, perhaps, or portentous striae of new forces coming into play) are looked upon as horrific, and to be stabilized, or standardized, and brought into the normal systole-diastole of things.[25]