... Thomas Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent.
There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"
and "Jennie Gerhardt" and again between "Jude the Obscure" and "Sister
Carrie." All four stories deal penetratingly and poignantly with the
essential tragedy of women; all disdain the petty, specious explanations
of popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy beauty.
Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an enchanted discovery of Hardy
in 1896, three years before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy to
push such a fact too hard, and to search for likenesses and parallels
that are really not there. The truth is that Dreiser's points of contact
with Hardy might be easily matched by many striking points of
difference, and that the fundamental ideas in their novels, despite a
common sympathy, are anything but identical. Nor does one apprehend any
ponderable result of Dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for Balzac, which
antedated his discovery of Hardy by two years. He got from both men a
sense of the scope and dignity of the novel; they taught him that a
story might be a good one, and yet considerably more than a story; they
showed him the essential drama of the commonplace.
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