It is hardly necessary to point to the difference between Dreiser’s morals and those of the Puritans. Puritan ethics, like all ethics, rested upon the preference given to the social over the individual motives of action. It opposed social and moral man to instinctive man and it destroyed the Indian because he was too elementary and bio-chemical. It brought about moral improvement by a system of restraints, as all Christian, Buddhist and even pagan ethics have done. One may well criticize the results of those experiments without wishing to annihilate the whole edifice at one stroke. It seems as unscientific to give everything to instinct as to deny it all. Is not art, in defect of religion, the ideal means to harmonize body and mind, the physical and the spiritual? Art shows a way out of chaos; it dispels the nightmare of Dreiser’s primitive world. Greed and lust are not yet, thank God! the only incentives left to man to give a meaning to life. There certainly exists something better, somewhere. And yet, comparing Dreiser’s pessimistic portraits of man as he is realistically to the “most smiling aspects of life” in, let us say, William Dean Howells, one cannot help finding them at least virile. Truth above all! And let us have all the truth. Remember the saying of Pascal that _qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête_. Dreiser’s dissociations have at least the courage of truth. He wanted to defy the sentimentalists and restore the carnal man in his rights. As a hero or as a victim? This is not easy to say. Where Eugene Witla and Clyde Griffiths flounder, Frank Cowperwood almost succeeds. Dreiser’s objectivity leaves us in the lurch concerning moral issues. There are still many among us who prefer life among the mid-Victorians to that among the plesiosauri. Dreiser’s challenge to our vital lies is too one-sided. He is not mid-Victorian enough. He atones for Howells’ sentimentalism and at the same time makes us long for the Kentons and the Laphams. Call it cowardice, if you want, or call it art. Such a starvation of the best human emotions is dangerous for an artist who wants to force a lesson upon his readers. It would indeed prove a mighty stroke of the cosmic irony if the realistic novels of such an honest seeker after truth as Theodore Dreiser served only to win the reader to the side of the sentimental writers. CHAPTER VI _Sinclair Lewis and the Average Man_