SOURCE: "The Making of Dreiser's Early Short Stories: The Philosopher and the Artist," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 47-63.

[In the following essay, Hakutani traces the common belief that Dreiser's thought was inconsistent—romantic, realist, mystic simultaneously—to the early short stories.]

In the summer of 1899, shortly before the writing of Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser tried his hand at the short story, his first concentrated effort to write fiction. Whatever technical devices he might have conceived, or whatever technical difficulties he might have encountered in producing his first short stories, the disposition of mind which lay behind and shaped these stories must have grown out of the disposition of the previous years. In fact, as a newspaperman in the early nineties, Dreiser felt severely restricted. He often detested the city editor's control over his selection of news material and his interpretation of it before the draft of an article was sent to press.

There is a great deal of information in A Book About Myself concerning the restrictions imposed by the press. But an article Dreiser wrote as late as 1938 still poses a question of the difference between literature and journalism. In this article Dreiser recalls a routine assignment while he was a young reporter in St. Louis. He was to interview an old millionaire about the city's new terminal project, and naturally he expected to meet a forceful experienced businessman. Unexpectedly, however, Dreiser met a pathetically aged and feeble man who thought of his success and power as useless. During the interview the old man could only say to Dreiser: "My interest in all these things is now so slight that it is scarcely worthwhile—a spectacle for God and men. . . ." Upon his return to the city desk, Dreiser asked the editor whether he should write about the old man's age. "No, no, no!" the editor almost shouted. "Write only his answers. Never mind how old he is. That's just what I don't want. Do you want to queer this? Stick to the terminal dope and what he thought. We're not interested in his age." "No doubt," Dreiser reflects, "the vast majority of the people thought of him even then as young, active, his old self. But all this while this other picture was holding in my mind, and continued so to do for years after. I could scarcely think of the city even without thinking of him, his house, his dog, his age, his bony fingers, his fame." Dreiser then concludes:

Those particular matters about which the city editor had asked to know concerned, as I now saw, only such things as were temporary and purely constructive in their interest, nothing beyond the day—the hour—in which they appeared.

Literature as I now saw, and art in all its forms, was this other realm, that of the painter, the artist, the one who saw and reported the non-transitory, and yet transitory too, nature of all our interests and dreams, which observed life as a whole and drew it without a flaw, a fact, missing. There, if anywhere, were to be reported or painted such conditions and scenes as this about which I had mediated and which could find no place in the rush and hurry of our daily press.

Then it was, and not until then, that the real difference between journalism and literature became plain.

["Lessons I Learned from an Old Man," Your Life, Vol. 2, January, 1938]

Compared with such an experience, his editorial and freelance work (1895-1900) was less inhibited in the expression of ideas. It is true that as editor and "arranger" of Ev'ry Month (1895-97) Dreiser was not always in command of its material; he complained of the limitation imposed by the publisher and of the necessity to cater to the predilection of readers. In his free-lance articles his freedom in selecting topics, of course, became much greater. There is no doubt that by the time he became involved in magazine work, particularly his free-lance writing, the kind of restriction he suffered in his newspaper experience had become less severe.

During this period Dreiser managed to express himself on the concepts that had been latent in his mind for a long time. It is clear that when he first read Herbert Spencer's work, he absorbed the technical theories of Spencerian determinism as he confessed in Ev'ry Month. Seeing the proof of determinism in his own experience, he ignored Spencer's inherent theory of unending progress and chose to believe that man was a victim of natural forces. Dreiser's conclusion then was that "man was a mechanism, undevised and unrelated, and a badly and carelessly driven one at that." More significantly, he declared with an implication of pessimism,

I felt as low and hopeless at times as a beggar of the streets. There was of course this other matter of necessity, internal chemical compulsion, to which 1 had to respond whether I would or no. I was daily facing a round of duties which now more than ever verified all that I had suspected and that these books proved. With a gloomy eye I began to watch how the chemical—and their children, the mechanical—forces operated through man and outside him, and this under my very eyes.

[A Book About Myself, 1922]

Whatever else he might have been in these years, Dreiser was a thoroughgoing determinist. He observed behavior in terms of natural laws: the complexities of individual life were to be explained by physical and chemical reactions.

Despite the pessimistic conclusion at which he arrived in his interpretation of deterministic theory, it is still possible to find optimism in his belief that there is an inward, driving force, which is pushing mankind upward and onward. It is important here to point to three related quotations from Ev'ry Month. First, as Dreiser wrote with a sign of optimism, Spencer showed "how life has gradually become more and more complicated, more and more beautiful, and how architecture, sculpture, painting and music have gradualy [sic] developed, along with a thousand other features of our life of to-day." Secondly, he expressed his latent hope: "We will be concerned with making things good, and with living so that things shall be better . . . there will be naught but hope, unfaltering trust and peace" [Vol. 3, No. 2, Nov. 1, 1896]. Finally, he quoted a Western journal as saying: "The world is not going downward to ruin, as the writer would have us believe. Everything in this splendid country has an upward trend, despite the wail of the cynics" [Vol. 3, No. 4, Jan. 1, 1897].

Such an apparent discrepancy in Dreiser's thoughts that can be seen in the period preceding the writing of his early fiction may account for a disharmony in his mind reflected in his novels. His critics, of course, have noticed this disharmony in discussing his fiction. R. L. Duffus, an early critic of Dreiser, felt that his mind was not all of a piece, and regarded him as romantic, realistic, and mystic all at once. As many critics have already pointed out, his reasoning was not reliable. He leaped to conclusions, generalized too easily, failed to examine narrowly enough. James T. Farrell remarked:

He accepted as science generalizations based on the ideas of nineteenth-century materialism. From these he adduced a deterministic idea, and this, in turn, was represented as biologic determinism. In The Financier and The Titan this biologic determinism is usually explained by the word "chemisms." Paradoxically enough, Dreiser's appeal to "chemisms" is made quite frequently in specific contexts concerning motivations of characters, where we can now see that the real rationale of these motivations can be most satisfactorily explained by Freudianism. Often his "chemisms" are overall generalizations of impulses of which the character is not aware. In this respect Dreiser asserted a biologic determinism, which, in terms of our present state of knowledge about man, is crude.

["James T. Farrell Revalues Dreiser's Sister Carrie" The New York Times Book Review, July 4, 1943]

This observation, perhaps, not only holds true of The Financier and The Titan but also is significant in revealing the loose formulae that Dreiser understood as laws. It must be added in this connection that Dreiser himself admitted to the existence of discrepancies in his fiction. In reply to the question as to what motives were important in writing his fiction, he said, "From time to time I have had all the motives you list and many variations of the same. In connection with a work of any length, such as a novel, I don't see how a person could have a single motivation; at least I never had."

In the making of his first stories, therefore, Dreiser might have had discrepant, or even contradictory, thoughts. Significantly enough, "The Shining Slave Makers," Dreiser's first fictional effort, submitted to the Century Magazine late in 1899 and subsequently rejected by its editor, is an allegory embodying a deterministic world view. What Dreiser tells by way of this allegory is reiterated in another short story, "Free," with which "The Shining Slave Makers" and the other early stories were later collected in a volume. Speaking for the plight of Rufus Haymaker, the protagonist of "Free," Dreiser makes this statement:

One of the disturbing things about all this was the iron truth which it had driven home, namely, that Nature, unless it were expressed or represented by some fierce determination within, which drove one to do, be, cared no whit for him or any other man or woman. Unless one acted for oneself, upon some stern conclusion nurtured within, one might rot and die spiritually. Nature did not care. . . . All along he had seen what was happening to him; and yet held by convention he had refused to act always, because somehow he was not hard enough to act. He was not strong enough, that was the real truth—had not been.

[Free]

In the second short story, "Butcher Rogaum's Door," Dreiser dramatizes a conflict between parent and child in much the same way as Stephen Crane deals with it in Maggie. Unlike the first two stories, the other stories in this group seem to mirror a considerable optimism and hope for man's condition. In "Nigger Jeff" the protagonist recognizes how a helpless man, a victim of natural forces within him and a prisoner of hostile forces in society, encounters his tragedy, his death. But this story by no means paints a hopeless predicament for man; man is also destined to ameliorate. "Nigger Jeff" ends with the hero's proclamation of his new ambition and hope not only for himself as an artist but for all men. And somewhat blatantly, in "When the Old Century Was New," the fourth story, there is more social optimism than Darwinism, so that Dreiser looks upon life as an easy struggle for Utopia rather than as a bitter struggle for survival.

It is also important to recognize that Arthur Henry, who later urged Dreiser to work on Sister Carrie, influenced him to write these stories. What philosophical influences Henry exercised on Dreiser during their friendship, especially before Dreiser wrote the early stories, are hard to define clearly. His letters show that Henry warned Dreiser against the dangers inherent in the contemplative disposition that Dreiser as editor revealed in the "Reflections" of Ev'ry Month. At that time Henry contributed essays entitled "The Philosophy of Hope" and "The Good Laugh" to Dreiser's magazine. Criticizing his despairing mood with a suggestion of optimism, Henry argued that Dreiser should turn to creative writing rather than pursue further his editorial work. So Henry, in the summer of 1897, invited him to visit the house at Maumee, Ohio, which Henry and his wife had bought, and suggested that they work together on various projects.

Because of further involvement in his work on Ev'ry Month and of his later venture into free-lance writing, Dreiser's visit to Maumee was postponed until the summer of 1899.

In the meantime, Dreiser and Jug (Sara Osborne White) were married in December 1898 in Washington. It was Henry again who, calling upon the newly wedded couple in their New York apartment, insisted that he write fiction. However, as late as 1898 Dreiser was not at all enthusiastic about becoming a novelist. As he told Mencken later, he had a desire to write drama in these years. But Henry, seeing short stories in him, finally forced him to work on a story:

I wrote one finally, sitting in the same room with him in a house on the Maumee River, at Maumee, Ohio, outside Toledo. This was in the summer of 1898 [1899]. And after every paragraph I blushed for my folly—it seemed so asinine!.] He insisted on my going on—that it was good—and I thought he was kidding me, that it was rotten, but that he wanted to let me down easy. Finally HE took [it], had it typewritten and sent it. . . . Thus I began[.]

The theme of "The Shining Slave Makers," as might be expected from Dreiser's current preoccupation with the deterministic philosophy, is the survival of the fittest. The setting of the story soon moves from the human world to the world of ants. As Dreiser describes the environment and the action of the inhabitant, the ants' world is bizarre and fantastic yet turns out to be the same world with which he was familiar. It is characterized by self-interest, greed, and the struggle for power.

"It was a hot day in August," Dreiser begins his tale. "The parching rays of a summer sun had faded the once sappy, green leaves of the trees to a dull and dusty hue." The observer of this spectacle is a man named Robert McEwen, a sensitive and sympathetic student of life much like Dreiser himself. McEwen, taking leave of the drudgery of the busy city life, comes out to take a seat under a soothing old beech tree. And for a while he sinks into his usual contemplative mood. Suddenly his meditation is interrupted by an ant crawling on his trousers. Shaking it off and then stamping on another running along the walk in front of him, McEwen now finds a swarm of other black ants hurrying about. At last, when one more active than the others catches his eye, McEwen follows its zigzag course while it stops here and there, examining something and considering the object's interest value. Suddenly, with a drowsy spell, McEwen discovers himself in an imaginary world in which, during a famine, the black ants are at war with the red ants.

Some critics have noticed a similarity between the setting of this tale and one of the interpolations Balzac makes towards the end of The Wild Ass's Skin. Balzac's passage reads:

Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug's one breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragonfly, pondered admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf? . . . Who has not looked long in delight at the effects of sun and rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or at the variously shaped petals of the flowercups? Who has not sunk into these idle, absorbing meditations . . . ?

In Balzac's story, however, its character, Valentin, is weary of his life and yet feels desperate at the thought of his approaching death. In order to divert his thoughts, Valentin tries to observe nature, thereby consoling himself with the equation of man and natural beings. "The leading idea of this human comedy," Balzac writes, "came to me first as a dream. . . . The idea came from the study of human life in comparison with the life of animals." Balzac's vision, in his writing of The Wild Ass's Skin, is that of a human biologist. In writing "The Shining Slave Makers" Dreiser is not viewing man's life in terms of animal life. Rather, as in Thoreau's ant war in Waiden, Dreiser is looking at ants in terms of man.

In its outline the first feature story he wrote for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. "The Fly," had the same intention as "The Shining Slave Makers," though less developed in its treatment than the short story in question. In "The Shining Slave Makers," the first ant that encounters McEwen in the dream interrogates him in a friendly manner but in a selfish tone: "'Anything to eat hereabout?' . . . McEwen drew back.'I do not know,' he said, 'I have just—' 'Awful,' said the stranger, not waiting to hear his answer. 'It looks like famine. You know the Sanguineae have gone to war.' 'No,' answered McEwen, mechanically." McEwen, upon seeing another ant carrying a crumb as large as the ant's body, asks the ant where it has found the crumb. "'Here,' said Ermi. 'Will you give me a little?' 'I will not,' said the other, and a light came in his eye that was almost evil."

With vivid dramatic force this situation projects a jungle-like world. More interestingly, McEwen, who is now a member of the same tribe, the black ants, cannot secure help from the ants of his own family. Needless to point out, the persistent, reciprocal warfare among members of the family is more evocative of life in the animal kingdom than it is of the world of civilized man. Ironically, Dreiser intended to project an image of the survival of the fittest, not in the world of men but in the world of ants.

Dreiser's major motif here is man's selfishness as it is illustrated by the ants' behavior toward their fellow beings at the time of a strife:

"All right," said McEwen, made bold by hunger and yet cautious by danger, "which way would you advise me to look?"

"Why, any way," said Ermi, and strode off.

He eagerly hailed the newcomer, who was yet a long way off.

"What is it?" asked the other, coming up rapidly.

"Do you know where I can get something to eat?"

"Is that why you called me?" he answered, eyeing him angrily.

"Certainly not. If I had anything for myself, I would not be out here. Go and hunt for it like the rest of us."

"I have been hunting," cried McEwen, his anger rising. "I have searched here until I am almost starved."

"No worse off than I or any of us, are you?" said the other. "Look at me. Do you suppose I am feasting?"

This is, to be sure, an allegory of life, but more importantly it is an allegory of Dreiser's own struggle in the past. In the newspaper experience of the early nineties, Dreiser viewed "life as a fierce, grim struggle in which no quarter was either given or taken, and in which all men laid traps, lied, squandered, erred through illusion" (Book). One ant's angry reply to McEwen, the newcomer, "Is that why you called me? . . . Go and hunt for it like the rest of us" is reminiscent of the very scene of the survival of the fittest that Dreiser witnessed in the office of Pulitzer's World when he managed to be on the staff of the paper in the cold winter months of 1894-95. In that newspaper office, as Dreiser later remembered, the men working under Pulitzer appeared to him like tortured animals. They were concerned only with themselves, and whenever Dreiser as fellow reporter asked them a question or favor, he would be stared at by them as if he were an idiot or a thief. This motif in "The Shining Slave Makers" is not contrived to fit the doctrine of survival but is based on an actual experience.

Later in the story, when another ant is facing death, the compassionate McEwen attempts to offer him aid, but the ant, now overwhelmed by his own despair and resignation, declines. McEwen now realizes how helpless a creature can be under these circumstances. He cannot but simply look silently on the ant. "The sufferer," Dreiser remarks, "closed his eyes in evident pain, and trembled convulsively. Then he fell back and died. McEwen gazed upon the bleeding body, now fast stiffening in death, and wondered." Dreiser's inference on the scene is clear cut: man, just like an insect, is powerless against those incidental forces that always surround him. This scene also resembles the aftermath of a train accident Dreiser reported a few years earlier in St. Louis. He then asked, viewing the dead bodies which were twisted and burned beyond recognition, "Who were they? The nothingness of man! They looked so commonplace, so unimportant, so like dead flies or beetles" (Book).

When a war breaks out between the black slave makers and the red Sanguineae (in Theoreau's ant war, between the black imperialists and the red republicans), McEwen, of course, sides with the black ants, but finally meets his own death. Dreiser seems to be telling himself: join the crowd, fight for the crowd, die for the crowd. The struggle for survival continues without purpose or a goal in sight. Only the fittest will survive; death alone is safe. After McEwen finally returns to reality, he is now possessed by a "mad enthusiasm." He tries to figure out the advantage of having met his recent comrades, the Shining Slave Makers, but, Dreiser writes, "finding it not he stood gazing. Then came reason, and with it sorrow—a vague, sad something out of far-off things."

By projecting a serious and significant human dilemma onto minute sub-human life, Dreiser achieves detachment. But, in the allegory, though detached from the violent scene in which the struggle for survival is carried on, he can look at McEwen somewhat in the same way that McEwen looks at these ants in the insect kingdom. In this way he does not reduce his life experience to a mere objective show but dramatizes it from a clumsy but instinctively derived point of view. By the solid material behind the theme and plot, the story became a powerful expression of his preoccupation at the time.

What Dreiser had to say in his first piece of fiction was exactly what brought about its rejection by the editor who first read the manuscript and returned it to the author with a letter protesting the "despicable philosophy." If this were the way the young author thought about man's life, the less he wrote about it the better. The editor thought that Dreiser was saying that men are cruel and deceptive just as nature is. The editor's reasoning was that Dreiser enjoyed these qualities of man—the brutal, the deceptive, the violent—and that Dreiser was, therefore, dangerous to human society. However, Dreiser, who was blazing in those years with a strong passion for society and fellow men, was still lined up against them.

Despite this slap from the timid and conventional editor-ambassador, Dreiser was soon to discover an ally. "The Shining Slave Makers" was accepted by Ainslee's Magazine for publication and Dreiser probably took this acceptance as an encouragement for the continuing adherence to his own philosophy. He then wrote "Butcher Rogaum's Door," "The World and the Bubble," "Nigger Jeff," and "When the Old Century Was New," and had all of them published. In "Butcher Rogaum's Door," Dreiser again justifies the value of Spencerian determinism. The events of the story happen with the mechanical consistency of the so-called "chemisms." The story is a study of an incident which Dreiser sees as inevitable, granted the incipient milieu in which the character is placed.

The plot first develops with the tension between an old father and his teen-age daughter, who has begun to be allured to the street lights and the boys loitering outdoors on summer evenings. As the title suggests, the door to Rogaum's apartment above his butcher shop on Bleecker Street, New York City, becomes significant. Old Rogaum tries to exhort against her going out after dark. But adolescent Theresa, awakening to a burgeoning sexual feeling, now wants "to walk up and down in the as yet bright street, where were voices and laughter, and occasionally moonlight streaming down"; thus she cannot help disregarding her father's discipline. The stubborn German father's last resort is threatening to lock her out, and indeed one night the determined old Rogaum does lock her out when she fails to return by nine from dallying with her young friend. At the door Theresa overhears her father talking savagely to Mrs. Rogaum, "Let her go, now. I vill her a lesson teach." Rattling the door again and getting no answer, she grows defiant. "Now, strangely," Dreiser observes, "a new element, not heretofore apparent in her nature, but, nevertheless wholly there, was called into life, springing in action as Diana, full formed. The cold chill left her and she wavered angrily." She walks back to George Almerting. The night deepens, no sound of Theresa, and Rogaum starts searching for her. Returning in fear and without success, he sees at the door a young woman writhing in unmitigated pain as a result of her having drunk acid in a suicide attempt. Rogaum at first mistakes the woman for his daughter Theresa. However clumsy the coincidence Dreiser devises to suggest Theresa's possible fate, this story in the simple truth of its setting and characters mirrors the world Dreiser had grown to accept. The suicide, like Theresa, was once locked out, but Theresa, unlike the suicide, is never to become a prostitute or suicide or both like Crane's Maggie. Theresa obviously was written about as though she were one of Dreiser's own sisters. He was portraying the life of the people he knew by heart and what they could have become.

Fortunately, Theresa comes back safely, unlike the girl who sees a tragic end. But this was exactly his own family, since the religious old father, strict with the wanton daughter, locked her out one night and then worried, so that when he regained her unharmed, he refrained from beating her as he had intended. In the story Dreiser, as elsewhere (Dawn, Jennie Gerhardt, The "Genius," An American Tragedy) treats the father with a sympathetic tone. A too Calvinistic German butcher, Rogaum emerges as a strangely appealing and rather pathetic figure. As in another of Dreiser's short stories, "Typhoon," the father is a German immigrant with a heavy accent and has a moderately prosperous small business. The children in the Dreiser family, and indeed those in the Gerhardts' and Griffiths' families, attempted to run away from their oppressive poverty-stricken household. The chief difference between the Rogaum family and the other families is that it is not poverty stricken. But here Dreiser's emphasis is upon the inability of parents to understand not only the social desires, in this case money, but the natural desires and inclinations of their children.

Mrs. Rogaum, "a particularly fat, old, German lady, completely dominated by her liege and portly lord," is warmhearted but is in no position to advise her daughter. Dreiser's image of the mother is a significant departure from that of a modern American mother. This is exactly the scene of the family he knew in his youth. Thus Dreiser delineates not so much the social conditioning of his individuals, as critics maintain, but the historical complexities that make understandable the uniqueness of each individual's experience.

The city life to which Theresa is attracted is also important historically. Dreiser is here interested in the American family of the 1890s, as in Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, which was changed and perverted by artificial lures. Theresa, like the children of the Dreiser family, is discontented with family ties and enchanted by the outside forces which sever her from the family. This is the same situation in which Dreiser describes Carrie's approaching the city in the summer of 1889 with the same "wonder and desire" he himself had felt in approaching Chicago two summers earlier. The role of the parent in the family structure was diminishing; the truth of this becomes obvious when the family of Dreiser's fiction is compared with that of the present day. And this change, while important in the values of the children, was devastating in its effects on the parents.

In "Butcher Rogaum's Door," concepts of individual morality are bound to the larger, overall concept of man in a society where the artificial restraints of social position are removed and where the chemical urges of the blood are observed and respected. If Theresa could become enthralled with the lures of the city and meet a fine young man with "a shrewd way of winking one eye" within the boundary of her household, she would not have gone out to the streets at night. Dreiser's point is that evil in man results not so much from an inherent tendency for evil in the individual as from the unreasonable and often unjust demands in society—in Theresa's case, the father, his customers, the police, and the townsmen in Bleecker Street. She is, first of all, the result of a home environment which has alienated her from life, so that when she faces its risks and might possibly be betrayed, it is the society that has provided such a milieu which is to blame. Likewise, whoever might exploit Theresa is not so much the result of a limitation of character as the result of society's failure to develop necessary virtues in the would-be exploiter. These are represented less as the natural virtue of the passively innocent than as the qualities of aggression, selfishness, deceptiveness, competition, which Dreiser perceives as the law of nature. In this sense "Butcher Rogaum's Door" is analogous to his first story, "The Shining Slave Makers."

In both stories the image of life Dreiser presents is necessarily colored by a rather pessimistic frame of mind in accord with the philosophy of the gloomy determinism that accounts for human conditions. This is, perhaps, most obviously shown at the end of "The Shining Slave Makers," where McEwen's vision of life as he is awakening from his recent dream is tinged with sorrow. This is also shown in the story of Rogaum and Theresa, but in this story the sense of sorrow is somewhat lightened by the hopeful tone Dreiser gives to the outcome of the incident. The story, of course, does not say that one should not lock out his daughter at night lest a dire fate befall her. Nor does it say that Theresa has learned a lesson so that she will not wander off at night again. For the author does not believe that man's life is only at the mercy of fate. Old Rogaum has learned that he must not be too harsh toward his daughter because he now recognizes the necessary demands of a young woman.

In the second story, then, Dreiser was to tell the reader that such a conflict between father and daughter can be adjusted. Man's unreasonable environment being ameliorated, man can learn. In "Nigger Jeff," the third story, Dreiser was yet to weave this sign of hope into patterns of action with architectonic skill. As a result, he achieved in the texture of the story a cumulative effect of no little significance. Because his two earlier stories derive from his own experiences (the characters in them are like himself, his family, and the people he knew, and the incidents are those he saw) his expression is spontaneous and markedly consonant with the feelings deeply rooted in his heart. Also in "Nigger Jeff" he was to express such congenial feelings as he remembered from an incident that occurred in his newspaper experience in St. Louis. The story develops around a report of an apparently nefarious rape; it is not simply an illustration of man's conduct observed in terms of the deterministic philosophy but rather the process of revelation a newspaper reporter goes through. One day he is sent out by the city editor to cover the lynching of a Negro rapist. The reporter, Eugene Davies, much like the young Dreiser in St. Louis, is portrayed as a naive youth. On that day, a bright spring afternoon, Davies "was feeling exceedingly well and good natured. The world seemed worth singing about." But, after learning the circumstances of the rape, the Negro's behavior, his family's grief, and above all the transcending beauty and serenity of nature in contrast with the human abjection and agonies, Davies realizes that his sympathies have shifted. This reporter, then, is not simply the obtuse observer, a mystery story character who watches the plot unfold. He is the perceiving center; he recognizes that the world is not neatly dichotomized as black and white. The action of the story takes place in the hero's reaction to the dreadful violence and in his understanding of American society and himself as artist.

One of the most salient technical devices displayed in this story is the contrast in the images of man and nature. Although in the beginning the reporter is convinced that Jeff is guilty, he grows increasingly less certain. Even before he reaches the site of the lynching, he takes note of "the whiteness of the little houses, the shimmering beauty of the little creek you had to cross in going from the depot. At the one main corner a few men [a part of the mob] were gathered about a typical village barroom." As the mob hurries on with the horror impending, the "night was exceedingly beautiful. Stars were already beginning to shine. . . . The air was fresh and tender. Some pea fowls were crying afar off and the east promised a golden moon." Again, a contrast of the light and the dark is maintained in a later scene:

. . . The gloomy company seemed a terrible thing. . . .

. . . He was breathing heavily and groaning. His eyes were fixed and staring, his face and hands bleeding as if they had been scratched or trampled on. He was bundled up like limp wheat.

. . . Still the company moved on and he followed, past fields lit white by the moon, under dark, silent groups of trees, through which the moonlight fell in patches, up hilltops and down into valleys, until at last the little stream came into view, sparkling like a molten flood of silver in the night.

As Davies watches the limp body plunging down and pulling up with the sound of a creaking rope, in the weak moonlight it seemed as if the body were struggling, but he could not tell. . . . Only the black mass swaying in the pale light, over the shiny water of the stream seemed wonderful.

. . . The light of morning began to show as tender lavender and gray in the east. Still he sat. Then came the roseate hue of day, to which the waters of the stream responded, the white pebbles shining beautifully at the bottom. Still the body hung black and limp, and now a light breeze sprang up and stirred it visibly.

On the one hand, the hero clearly recognizes the signs of evil indicated by "the struggling body," "the black mass," and "the body hanging black and limp." On the other, the images of the dark are intermingled in Davies' mind with those of the light that suggest hope: "the weak moonlight," "the pale light," "the shiny water of the stream," "the light of morning," "tender lavender and gray in the east," "the roseate hue of day," "the white pebbles shining beautifully at the bottom." As the story progresses toward the end, the images of good increasingly dominate those of evil, a pattern already revealed in this scene.

Later, visiting the room where the body is laid and seeing the rapist's sister sobbing over it, Davies becomes aware that all "the corners of the room were quite dark, and only in the middle were shining splotches of moonlight." For Davies, the climactic scene of his experience takes place when he dares to lift the sheet covering the body. He can now see exactly where the rope tightened in the neck. The delineation of the light against the dark is, once more, focused on the dead body as Dreiser describes it: "A bar of cool moonlight lay across the face and breast." Such deliberate contrasts between the light and the dark, hope and despair, suggest that man has failed to appreciate "transcending beauty" and "unity of nature," which are really illusions to him, and that he has only imitated the cruel and the indifferent which nature appears to symbolize.

At the end of the story, Davies is overwhelmed not only by the remorse he feels for the victim but also by his compassion for the bereft mother he finds in the dark corner of the room. "Davies," Dreiser writes, "began to understand. . . . Out in the moonlight, he struck a pace, but soon stopped and looked back. The whole dreary cabin, with its one golden door, where the light was, seemed a pitiful thing. He swelled with feeling and pathos as he looked. The night, the tragedy, the grief he saw it all." The emphasis of the story is not, therefore, upon the process of the young man's becoming an artist; it is upon the sense of urgency in which the protagonist is compelled to act as a reformer. With his final proclamation, "I'll get it all in," the hero's revelation culminates in a feeling of triumph. Although, to Dreiser, man appears necessarily limited by his environment and natural feeling, Dreiser asserts that man can learn.

"Nigger Jeff," in disclosing true social conditions, can be construed as a powerful expression of Dreiser's hope for the better in American society. And it is quite reasonable to suppose that all this time there was in Dreiser as much optimism in viewing life as a struggle for Utopia as there was pessimism. For among his earliest short stories the last, "When the Old Century Was New," though generally considered inferior, is clearly more a wistful Utopian picture than the others. He reconstructs one day in the spring of 1801 in New York City after the turn of the century. In such a world there is no misery, no struggle; the gulf dividing the rich from the poor is unimportant, and the friction between social classes is totally unknown. William Walton, a dreamer, taking a day off from his business engagement, strolls down the social center of New York. There he notices the celebrities of the city, even Thomas Jefferson and "the newly-elected President" Adams.

Walton is also Dreiser himself; Walton, too, like Dreiser with Jug in New York, is accompanied by his fiancée:

Elatedly they made their way to the old homestead again, and then being compelled to leave her, while she dressed for the theatre, he made his way toward the broad and tree-shaded Bowery, where was the true and idyllic walk for a lover. . . . Here young Walton, as so many others before him, strolled and hummed, thinking of all that life and the young city held for him. Here he planned to build that mansion of his own—far out, indeed, above Broome Street.

Unlike Walton, however, Dreiser cannot help noticing "the aristocracy, gentry and common rabble forming in separate groups." Although Walton at heart feels optimistic toward the new century, Dreiser at his side could not escape the prospect of misery and oppression. Dreiser observes with a touch of satire that Walton "had no inkling, as he pondered, of what a century might bring forth. The crush and stress and wretchedness fast treading upon this path of loveliness he could not see." F. O. Matthiessen can legitimately call "When the Old Century Was New" only a sketch "with nothing to distinguish it from other paper-thin period pieces." But it is worth noting that even in such a slight piece of fiction there is Dreiser's dramatization of the American success story with his world of changing cities, where new careers and new fortunes are made daily. Despite the gloom hovering under the deterministic theory of life at his disposal, there was in his mind during this period much joy and optimism that influenced his writing.

Robert E. Spiller, in the Literary History of the United States, maintains that Dreiser's short stories "in theme and treatment add little to an analysis of the novels and may be compared to a painter's sketches." But these prenovel short stories are, nonetheless, closely related to his early novels. In subject matter these stories are studies on the conditions of men and women in society, sometimes as individuals and at other times as groups. Man tends to be a victim of forces not only within him but about him. Dreiser, moreover, views men not only as social individuals but also, as in "Butcher Rogaum's Door," as historical individuals. Much can be learned from the pages of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt about the nature and structure of American society and the American family in the years before the turn of the century. But, delineating the growth of cities, exhibiting the forceful lures of city life, and emphasizing the conflict between convention and individual demands, Dreiser shows one of the basic motifs of his early novels in such stories as "Butcher Rogaum's Door" and "When the Old Century Was New."

His early stories, like the ant tragedy developed in "The Shining Slave Makers" give him a congenial means of expression, primarily because they contain characters, whether in an allegory or a historical romance, like Dreiser himself, personages he knew or events he remembered from his experience. It is arguable that Dreiser's early short fiction would have been more significant had he not been influenced by many of the specific technical concepts of the Spencerian world. More important for the argument here is that, as an artist, Dreiser transcends these technicalities and writes fiction with living individuals, whose personalities express their historical milieu and do not reflect merely the abstract motivations of "chemisms." This is, perhaps, why Eliseo Vivas has observed: "Fortunately the sincere artist magnificently contradicted the self-taught materialist and found a purpose that, had he been consistent, he could not have found. . . . And if life's meaning is something sad or tragic, in Dreiser's own life, in his enormous capacity for pity, we find an example of a man who, through his work, gave the lie to his own theories." What prompted Dreiser to write fiction was his overwhelming desire to understand human beings. Unlike other literary naturalists, Dreiser attempted to discover an ideal order in man's life as he does in these stories. In this sense, he is more an idealist than a pessimist. And his understanding of humanity often goes beyond the deterministic philosophy he learned from Spencer.

This ambivalence in Dreiser's thoughts in the making of the early stories gave rise to his practice of applying the theory of determinism as well as designing his stories with a historical, and often personal, significance. This is why consistency in these stories is nearly impossible. Even though his characters tend to be controlled by circumstances, the focus of the stories is upon the individual and the moral consequences of his actions, as shown by Eugene Davies in "Nigger Jeff." Dreiserian characters are sometimes larger than the author's occasional philosophy, and then they are able to speak for themselves. Dreiser the philosopher only gets in their way; Dreiser the artist remains true to them. In the end the interest of the story lies not in his mind, but in his heart. Hence, his frequent tone of optimism, mingled, as it frequently is, with his pessimism, can be reasonably accounted for.