“Yes, yes,” Clyde said reflectively. “I have thought since it must have been that way.” The Reverend McMillan paused and to hearten himself for this task began to pray--but silently--and to himself: “Our Father who art in Heaven--Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done--on earth as it is in Heaven.” This admirable scene is an excellent example of Theodore Dreiser’s realism at his best. There is enough of suffused emotion in it to make it human and artistically impressive. Such is the work of Theodore Dreiser as a novelist. He is harsh and pessimistic. He takes away from us all our illusions. He makes us pay for truth at any cost with what we hold most interesting in ordinary fiction--sentiment, pathos, irony--but he does it in good faith. And he is quite as often harsh, honest, painstaking, vigorous and often mighty. Yes, his philosophy is without illusions but it is certainly not his fault: It is strange, but life is constantly presenting these pathetic paradoxes--these astounding blunders which temperament and blood moods bring about and reason and circumstance and convention condemn. The dreams of man are one thing--his capacity to realize them another. At either pole are the accidents of supreme failure and supreme success--the supreme failure of Abelard for instance, the supreme success of a Napoleon, enthroned at Paris. But, oh, the endless failures for one success. Balzac at least, in the preface to his “Comédie humaine,” did not completely despair of man. Was he good or bad, he surely did not know, but he ushered in the priest and the physician to make him better, if need be. Theodore Dreiser leaves us very little hope of the reformation of the fallen angel. He writes: It is a question whether the human will, of itself alone, ever has cured or ever can cure any human weakness. Tendencies are subtle things. They are involved in the chemistry of one’s being, and those who delve in the mysteries of biology frequently find that curious anomaly, a form of minute animal life--chemically and physically attracted to its own disaster. Then we learn, to our delight, the beautiful names of some of the Cowperwoods, Hurstwoods, Jennie Gerhardts and Eugene Witlas of biology. They are called the “paramecium,” “the vorticella,” “the actinobolus” and the “halteria grandinella.” Biological fatalism is, when all is told, the heart of Theodore Dreiser’s philosophy and the background of his work as an artist. When not suffused with some human appeal it opens only a blind alley to an artist. As a philosophical creed it even tends to exclude art entirely, because it forbids freedom. Art is the product of mind at play with the world. Why should the artist enjoy a liberty which he denies his characters and what is left to beauty in a blind and an absurd universe? Let us sum up Dreiser’s decalogue: 1. Our will cannot prevail over our temperament. 2. Instinct is the enemy of reason.