Medea speaks in Euripides’ tragedy, who can speak better than she, and who can say that her words are ancient or modern instead of being simply and beautifully human? In “A Traveller at Forty,” Dreiser devotes several interesting pages to the Dutch painters. He recognized himself in these unsophisticated artists, who found beauty everywhere around them. Nothing, according to him, is easier than to soar into metaphysics, sentimentality or mysticism. We ought to be grateful to those who can love life as it is and make us love it without concealing its imperfections. He praises the Dutch painters for giving us the most perfect expression of common and everyday beauty. They were not romantic but human. Theodore Dreiser envies those unassuming artists who were content to paint the arrival of a courier, an evening school, a skating party, a dance of rustics, a flock of wild ducks, the cows at milking time, a game of backgammon, a woman knitting socks, a cat playing with her kittens, etc. Still more interesting than the homeliness of the Dutch masters was the exquisite finesse of their sensations, the marvelous temperament through which even the commonplace became idealized.[28] _Life seen through a temperament_,--this is art, according to Dreiser, who has not forgotten the lesson of Maupassant and Zola. He defines art as _an emotional and intellectual reflection of intuition through life_. CHAPTER V _Theodore Dreiser and the American Tragedy_ In the preceding chapter I presented the general philosophy of Theodore Dreiser. Let us now survey his novels in their respective order of publication. The first in date was “Sister Carrie” (1900). We are told that the author had to curtail a great deal of the material of this book--a feat very unfamiliar to him--and this very likely explains why his first novel, one of the most interesting ever written by him, is the most in keeping with the ordinary canon of literary proportions. Every reader will remember Sister Carrie’s story. Being a poor American girl, she left her family to earn a living and started for Chicago with scarcely a penny. On the train she met a smart “drummer” of flirtatious disposition. Carrie stopped for a while with her relatives, but she could not endure the misery very long. She looked vainly for congenial work and finally sought her drummer again. He rented an apartment for her and she became his mistress. She soon tired of him and became acquainted with the manager of a bar, a middle-aged man with wife and children, who left everything for her sake. This man was honestly in love with Carrie and devoted to her to the point of committing a theft, of which Carrie herself knew nothing. They go to Canada and thence to New York, where Carrie’s lover proves a failure. The book ends tragically and almost cynically by the man committing suicide and Carrie going on alone to make a triumphant career on the stage. The story, like most of Dreiser’s stories, is rather monotonous and bleak.