The name is absent

Dreiser’s Supernatural Naturalism 55

Nearer we hold of God

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.

(“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” U. 29-30,42)

To George Meredith, a philosophical view of the orderly
march of the stars affords both a resolution of the problem
of evil (“Lucifer in Starlight”) and an awareness of the evo-
lutionary unity of a universe interpenetrated by divinity:

The spirit leaps alight,
Doubts not in them is he,
The binder of his sheaves, the same, the right;

That there with toil Life climbs the selfsame Tree,
Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped.
So may we read and Uttle find them cold;

Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide
Our eyes . ..

(“Meditation under Stars,” 11. 50-52, 57-61)

Theodore Dreiser is too good a Spencerian not to differ-
entiate between Appearances and ActuaRty, but by the same
token he is too much a Huxleyan agnostic to share the opti-
mistic predisposition of Meredith, Browning, and Tenny-
son. In effect, they beg the question that is central to his
investigation of the nature of things, for they not only posit
a spiritual basis of ultimate reality, but also assume by faith
an essential harmony with man’s highest ethical nature. For
Dreiser, the question of “the intention of the Overraling, in-
telligent, constructive force” remains an eternal riddle. On
the evidence of Appearances, the creative power seems to be
“subtle, cruel, crafty, and malicious”; or, at best, “a dual
personality or a compound of good and evil—the most ideal
and ascetic good, as well as the most fantastic and swinish
evil . . . a God of storms and horrors as well as of serenities
and perfections” (The “Genius,” pp. 694, 726). Nevertheless,

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