Dreiser’s Supernatural Naturalism 63
stumbling-blocks of personal deficiency and the barricades of
censorship and derogation, to achieve a universally recognized
eminence in American letters. The struggle gave him to think
furiously, though not systematically. All his writings were
variations upon a single theme, which he named in the sec-
ond part of the title of Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A BOOK OF
THE MTSTERT AND WONDER AND TERROR OF
LIFE.g Until one has pondered well the implications of that
awesome subtitle, one had best not try to generalize the in-
tellectual attitude and philosophical conclusions of Theodore
Dreiser. He was, himself, certain of only what experience
taught Solon Barnes: “Life was very strange.” (The Bulwark,
p. 128.) His rule-of-thumb for personality was that there is
no rule:
The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, per-
haps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a
bundle of contradictions—none more so than the most
capable.7
The variety of temperament and behavior of the five Bames
children illuminates his view of the impossibility of referring
human character to a simple formula of heredity and en-
vironment.
As for Etta and Stewart, both Solon and even Benecia even-
tually found them enigmas, and so they remained. They had
both begun dimly to suspect that they might not easily be
encompassed in any given theory of life. During Etta’s in-
fancy and early youth, Solon was compelled to realize that
she was the most individual and peculiar of all.. .
There are natures which, unlike those of a practical or ma-
terialistic turn, are early taken with the vims of the ideal and
can never escape it. They are born so. To them the world is
never the material practical thing which many take it to be,
but always colorful, symphonic, exquisite—only their own
adjustment to it is unsatisfactory, without that sympathetic
understanding and relationship with others which they so
greatly crave. Indeed from her very youngest days Etta was