The name is absent

62 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

which heredity (somewhat poorly understood) and environ-
ment (considerably better comprehended) were the mutually
operative determinants?⁵ Many passages, in addition to those
already noted, weigh heavily in that balance. Words like
“fate” readily flow from his pen: “Here was this boy [Bass
Gerhardt] arrested and fined for what fate was practically
driving him to do.” (Jennie Gerhardt, p. 75.) “So much for the
effect of wealth, beauty, the peculiar social state to which
he [Clyde Griffiths] most aspired, on a temperament that was
as fluid and unstable as water.” (An American Tragedy,
p. 338.) “That worthy [Drouet] had his future fixed for him
beyond a peradventure. He could not help what he was go-
ing to do.” (Sister Carrie, p. 85.) “What he [Cowperwood]
was now planning must be as it was because it sprang out of
conditions which fife itself, operating through him and
others, had created and shaped, and in any event not to be
changed now.” (The Stoic, p. 47.) The authentic Dreiserian-
ism of these quotations, even read out of context, is unmis-
takable.

And yet there is no way to make Dreiser consistent with
himself except to interpret him, like Ibsen, as more an
asker than an answerer of questions. Never was an eager
seeker for truth more poorly equipped with technical skills
and information, or indeed with any positive qualifications
for the search save honesty, courage, and earnest persistence.
He had read or, rather, read in—how widely or deeply is diffi-
cult to estimate—the skeptical and pessimistic science, phi-
losophy, and literature of the second half of the nineteenth
century and the early years of the twentieth. Negatively, his
religious upbringing had made him suspicious of dogmatic
truths and logical certainties. Battling the world from the
wrong side of the tracks, he finally surmounted both the

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