One can
easily imagine the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds upon
a youth groping about for self-understanding and self-expression. They
swept him clean, he tells us, of the lingering faith of his boyhood--a
mediaeval, Rhenish Catholicism;--more, they filled him with a new and
eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life that lay about him, a
desire to seek out its hidden workings and underlying causes. A young
man set afire by Huxley might perhaps make a very bad novelist, but it
is a certainty that he could never make a sentimental and superficial
one. There is no need to go further than this single moving adventure to
find the genesis of Dreiser's disdain of the current platitudes, his
sense of life as a complex biological phenomenon, only dimly
comprehended, and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and of
holding to what he finds good. Ah, that he had learned from Huxley, not
only how to inquire, but also how to report! That he had picked up a
talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so damnably
persuasive, so crystal-clear!
But the more one examines Dreiser, either as writer or as theorist of
man, the more his essential isolation becomes apparent.
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