64 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
a dreamer, stricken with those strange visions of beauty
which sometimes hold us all spellbound, enthralled, but with-
out understanding. In no way in which her father, her sisters,
and her brothers were wise was she wise. There is a wisdom
that is related to beauty only, that concerns itself with cloud
forms and the wild vines’ tendrils, whose substance is not
substance, but dreams only, and whose dreams are entangled
with the hopes and the yearnings of all men.
Etta was such a one. From her earliest days of under-
standing or feeling, she was living in a world quite apart.
(The Bulwark, pp. 129-130)
The “virus of the ideal” infects Sister Carrie, Jennie Ger-
hardt, and Eugene Witla as well as Etta Bames. Readers who
find Dreiser’s novels only a record of human automation have
altogether missed the implication of such plain statements
as the following, and of the fictional episodes that give them
point: “Life rises to a high plane of the dramatic, and hence
of the artistic, whenever and wherever in the conflict regard-
ing material possession there enters a conception of the
ideal.” (The Titan, p. 485.) That profound and poetic sense
of the Ideal, coupled with an unflagging interest in the physi-
cal circumstances of experience, baffles every effort to as-
similate Theodore Dreiser and his fiction to any “ism.” His
lack of philosophical system and of verbal concordance is a
further discomfort to the classifiers, for he Jostles almost
shoulder-to-shoulder, as in The “Genius” phrases like “sur-
vival of the fittest” and “evolution of the race” with looser
talk about “dark forces moving aimlessly” and “the race
spirit,” description of human relationships as “chemical
affinities,” and quotations of Christian Science—not to men-
tion the somewhat petulant demand by Eugene WitIa:
Were there any fixed laws of being? Did any of the so-called
naturalistic school of philosophers and scientists whom he
had read know anything at all? They were always talking
about the fixed laws of the universe—the unalterable laws
of chemistry and physics. Why didn’t chemistry or physics