The American Painter and Writer’s

Credo of “Art for Truth’s Sake”:

Robert Henri and john Sloan;
Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser
b y Joseph J . Kwiat

rt for truth’s sake was the credo for two painters, Robert Henri
and John Sloan, and for two writers, Frank Norris and Theodore
Dreiser, during the so-called Progressive Period in America. Guy
,Pene du Bois, a painter and art critic at that time, expresses the
general attitude of the artistic rebels in his generation when, in 1914, he writes:
“Art is not a question of art but a question of life. We do not buy clothes for
clothes’ sake, but for the sake of their relation to us. That is true of living and
should be true of art.”’ This conception of the inextricable relationship between
art and reality characterizes and even summarizes the attitudes of these
specific painters and writers and, indeed, of many of their “advanced” con-
temporaries who were engaged in changing the character of American social,
intellectual and cultural life in the years before the First World War.
If we focus upon these two graphic artists and two novelists, it is apparent
286 Journal of American Culture

that they are representative of many other painters and writers who were
working in America from the 1890’s to, approximately, 1915. The names which
come to mind, among many others, are William J. Glackens, George Luks,
Everett Shinn and Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland and Jack London. I t is
worth noting that many of these figures served a significant period of
apprenticeship as newspaper artists and reporters or as magazine illustrators
and writers. Their journalistic backgrounds compelled a recognition of the
intimate and complex relationship between their experiences of the “facts of
life” and their ability to interpret them in accurate and emotionally
recognizable pictorial and literary forms and genres. These journalists became,
then, professional “recorders” of life for a popular audience. They were,
furthermore, profoundly impressed by the picturesque and varied life of the
city, San Francisco for Norris and New York for the others. The dramatic
contrasts between Park Avenue and the lower East Side, Central Park and the
Bowery, and Wall Street and Hester Street attracted them; these clashing
styles of life captured their imagination and heightened their awareness of the
variety of characters and of the picturesque and even bizarre details which
made the new urban phenomenon sociologically interesting and artistically
arresting.
Seeking life where it was most immediate in its color and diversity, the
painters and writers considered themselves artistic “spectators” and
“recorders” of the American city. Their sense of urgency to relate art to life and
to truth was also a reaction against the theory and practice of the Academy in
the graphic arts and of the Genteel Tradition in literature. The consequence of
these two powerful cultural forces, which determined the general direction of
 Art for Truth’s Sake 287

the arts in America, was the ready acceptance of William Dean Howells’
assertion, relatively early in his own career, that truthfulness to American life
would reflect its more smiling aspects and was, therefore, respectable, in good
taste, and to be emulated. The artistic rebels insisted, however, that this
traditional point of view was only a limited one. Even more seriously, they
considered the conventional perspective to be a false representation of life as
they had experienced it. I t was their mission, they believed, to portray life
truthfully and in all its complexity, and to reeducate the American audience
with these counter-conventional theories. Furthermore, they attempted to
serve as a catalyst for the generally stagnant state of American painting and
writing by presenting their own creative efforts as “evidence” of the significant
changes which they were announcing and anticipating.

I
The revolutionary “Eight” Show at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City,
in 1908, gave Robert Henri his opportunity to express a theory which seemed
to be artistically unconventional. He states that any honest art must be
concerned with life: “Always art must deal with life, and it becomes important
as the ideas of the artist are significant. Art to every man must be his personal
confession of life as he feels it and knows it. The lack of human quality in
painting or sculpture means the lack of that vitality which makes for
permanence.”2 He develops this idea in an article which reviews an exhibition
in New York:
Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable,
and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life‘s
experience. The artists who produce the most satisfactory art are in my mind those who are
absorbed in the civilization in which they are living.*
Henri’s variation on this Emersonian theme is reflected in his remarks about
his artistic intentions in portrait painting: “I am looking at each individual
with the eager hope of finding there something of the dignity of life, the humor,
the humanity, the kindness, something of the order that will rescue the race
and the nation.”‘ When asked whether it is more important for an artist to
paint or to illustrate, Henri answers: “The only important thing is that a man
should have a distinct vision, a new and fresh insight into life, into nature, into
human character, that he should see the life about him so clearly that he sees
past the local and the national expression into the universal . . . 5 And in his
book, The A r t Spirit, he writes: “I am not interested in any one school or
movement, nor do I care for art as art. I am interested in life.”6
Former students and colleagues and critics have testified to Henri’s
enduring preoccupation with the relationship between art and life in his artistic
theory. His first opportunities to express his ideas in the 1890’s were in his
classes a t The Philadelphia School of Design for Women and in conversations
at his Walnut Street studio. I t was not until he settled in New York City in
1901, however, that his reputation as a leader of a significant new movement in
art began to be established. And once established, it grew rapidly. As early as
1906 a critic recognizes in Henri a powerful force who exerts his influence upon
288 Journal of American Culture

a diverse and youthful group: “At present he is the patriarch of [the] Cafe
Francis crowd, a number of young painters, illustrators and literati who believe
in the poetical and pictorial significance of the ‘Elevated’ and the skyscraper,
of city crowds and rows of flat houses. To these men Henri expounds his
theories of art.”’
One of these disciples, Everett Shinn, expresses in his own flamboyant
style the indebtedness of American art to both Henri and S10an:~
Without Henri’s and Sloan’s prompt and relentless efforts, Art in America would have imbibed its
“Mickey Finn” of complacency, slept on, hobbled on, sinking lower and lower until our galleries and
art institutions would have turned into markets for calendars, burnt wood, cigar box lids, cosmetic
displays, sofa cushions-sugary and perfumed with the heavy odor of preservatives.e

Guy Pene du Bois also indicates that the method used by Henri stimulated his
American colleagues toward a keener and fresher understanding of the
potentially rich material for pictorial representation in the urban environment:
Henri had just returned from France, where . . . he had completely assimilated the new French free-
dom, learned to see men as men instead of puppets moving with carefully mincing steps in a fantas-
tically emasculated society. He taught these men to grin a t the historical novelists of the day and to
side with Theodore Dreiser when he came along. They soon had no patience with escapists. Here,
before their eyes, was the untouched panorama of life, an unlimited field, an art bonanza. Here in the
Alligator Cafe on the Bowery, the Haymarket on Sixth Avenue, the ferry-boats, the lower East
Side, in any number of cheap red-ink restaurants, one found subjects as undefiled by good taste or
etiquette or behavior- that national hypocrisy-as a new-born babe.lU

The “seat of sedition among the young,” du Bois points out, was the Henri
class at the New York School of Art where his preaching of art for life’s sake
(“It isn’t the subject but what you feel about it”) clashed with the ideas of the
influential academic painter and teacher, William Merritt Chase, who
propounded his own diluted doctrine of art for art’s sake.”
John Sloan gives convincing evidence of his awareness of the relationship
between art and life. He, too, believes that art is both a human response to life
and a “record.” Anything that originates as “the response of the living to life”
is art; and the art work becomes, as a consequence of the artist’s response, an
historical “record.” The artist is, therefore, a unique historian.I2
Early entries from Sloan’s Diary reveal the intimate relationship between
his warmly sympathetic response to the life around him and his groping efforts
to translate his interests and feelings into pictorial form. The Bowery and the
life of its Chinatown caught his eye, and his responses are recorded in his Diary
for 1906: “About 8:30 in the evening . . . went down to the Bowery and walked
through Chinatown and Elizabeth Street. It was the first time I had been down
there at night-found it right interesting. Perhaps Chinatown is a bit too
picturesque for my p u r p ~ s e s . ’Six
’ ~ ~days later, he criticizes the artistic values
of a friend, Walter Norris, for emphasizing “rules” at the expense of more
important considerations: “Norris’s opinions about art are valuable tho’ I
think there is some little tendency to find the rules and exceptions to rules
which go to make great pictures-not enough centering of the mind on an
important Idea about Life-rather than Art.”“
 Art for Truth’s Sake 289

Sloan reflects upon the spectacle of the life of the city, and upon its rich
artistic possibilities, in numerous entries in his Diary for 1907. A walk on
Ninth Avenue inspires a word-picture which reveals the artist’s delight in
details of a commonplace scene: “ I took a stroll up 9th Ave. thro’ the muck-
covered streets with dirty heaps of melting snow-children swarming in the
pools of dirt sledding down 3 or 5 foot slushy heaps having lots of fun-the
curb vegetable market, meat wagons & blue-looking chickens in the mud, and
the sun that gets by the elevated railway ~ t r u c t u r e . ”Two
~ ~ months later, he
describes his deliberate, detailed and energetic pursuit of a potential subject for
his “study” of life and art: “Walked today-and at a distance shadowed a poor
wretch of woman on 14th St.-watched her stop to look at Billboards-go into
5 cent store and take candy-nearly run over at 5th Avenue dazed and always
trying to arrange hair and hatpins. To the Union Square Lavatory-she then
sits down, gets newspaper, always uneasy-probably no drink as yet this
day-”‘6
Similarly, the “vulgar” life of Coney Island has its own fascination for
Sloan: “To Coney Island. . . . The Concert Halls with their tawdry gaudy
bawdy beauties are fine-and on the beach the sand covered suits of the women
who loll and ‘cavort’ are great-look like soft sandstone sculptures full of the
real ‘vulgar’ human life. Crowds watch the people coming down the Bamboo
slide in Luna Park-lingerie displays bring a roar of natural ‘vulgar’ mirth.””
Sloan’s sensual appreciation of the scene extends, however, beyond mere visual
enjoyment; it is his method for preparing and studying life for the purposes of
his work as an artist. One week later, he writes in his Diary: “Went to Coney
Island where I wandered about trying to soak it up-like a blotter in a sea of
variegated inks and as ineffectively I’m afraid.”l8
John Butler Yeats, father of the distinguished Irish poet, states that
Sloan’s perceptive comments reveal his sympathetic attitude toward human
beings living in the world of the large city. When, for example, Sloan
comments upon William Hogarth’s art, he generalizes that, since we fly from
what we hate, Hogarth’s familiarity with the London underworld proves his
love for it.I9Yeats argues that Sloan took neither life nor art lightly: “Like the
great medieval painters, he is serious about life and art. If at first his severity
offends we will turn to him again and find in his strangeness something restful;
for his severity is the self-restraint of a man who will not be deceived, who,
while looking everywhere for visions of tenderness and beauty, refuses to shut
his eyes to facts.”20Sloan’s disciplined curiosity and study of human life, his
respect for its dignity, and his love for its beauty and compassion for its
weaknesses, are revealed in the voyeuristic suggestiveness of this
Whitmanesque entry in this Diary:
On account of the extreme heat a man and woman in a small furnished room opposite the room in
which we sat . . . were in extreme deshahille. It was interesting to watch Mrs. H . as she looked at
the man (finally naked) and tittered. Mrs. R . who should do better merely imitated Margery. This
all occurred with the full knowledge of the people observed. I am in the habit of watching every bit of
human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it. I “peep” through
real interest, not being observed myself. I feel that it is no insult to the people you are watching to
do so unseen, but that to do it openly and with great expression of amusement is evidence of real
UUlgQn‘ty.’’
290 Journal of American Culture

When Sloan moved from Philadelphia to New York in 1904, he lived on

West 23rd Street, and here he painted the subjects and the life which held his
interests and moved him: the tenderloin district, Madison Square, and the
human activity on the roof tops in the summer. He asserts that these paintings
hold no social propagandistic intentions, and that “if there is ‘social
consciousness’ in the city life pictures it came from my interest in the life
around me.”22
After 1913, Sloan gradually moved away from his paintings of city life for
several reasons: his acceptance of the revolutionary effect of European
modernism in the Armory Show of 1913, his reformulation of artistic theories
as a teacher at the Art Students’ League, and his new interest in painting
landscapes of Gloucester, Massachusetts, during the summer months.23
Another major reason for abandoning the cityscape is the swiftly changing
character and pace of the city itself. When the automobile, for example, comes
to play its part in the city’s life, everything that is picturesque and significant
for Sloan’s art seems to have passed: “The city is spoiled for me now by the
automobile. You can’t see a street or a place or an incident without a mass of
cars rushing by. . . . The subways are full of splendid material, but the people
move out of the trains so quickly. Most of my old city pictures were of places I
knew well. I saw some incident which gave the idea for the picture. While
working from memory, I could always go back to the place to study the
color-mood,the sense of light, the quality of the place.”24
The painter’s preoccupation with the relationship between art and a
truthful vision of life is evident in his book, Gist of A r t . The artist, Sloan
writes, “must have an interest in life, curiosity and penetrating inquiry into
the livingness of things. I don’t believe in art for art’s sake.”25Finally, Sloan’s
profound compassion for humanity is reflected in his interpretation of the
humane sensibilities of the graphic artists he admires:
People are funny enough without our being cruel to them. Some think Daumier was a caricaturist, a
satirist, but he was never cruel. His people may look like elephants or earthworms, but exaggerated
as they may be they are three times as human as people could ever be. They all belong to the same
human family. The same thing is true of Rembrandt’s portraits. They are all family portraits,
pictures of himself. . . , If you go deep enough into life you find

I1

Frank Norris’ attitude toward the relationship between literature and a

truthful vision of life is discussed in his articles for the San Francisco Wave, in
his letters, in his collected essays, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, and in
his short stories and novels. In a review of Stephen Crane’s Maggie and
George’s Mother for the Wave (July 4, 1896), he praises the author for his
brilliant style; at the same time, however, he criticizes him for portraying the
general and typical at the expense of the particular and the individual which
has the virtue of conveying an intimate understanding of the life he is
describing: “The author is writing . . . from the outside. Mr. Crane does not
 Art for Truth’s Sake 291

seem to know his people.

He does not seem to have
gotten down into their life
and to have written from
what he saw around him.
His people are types, not
characters, his scenes and
incidents are not partic-
ularized. . . . With him it
is the broader, vaguer,
human interest that is the
main thing, not the smal-
ler details of a particular
phase of life.”27We again
see the necessity of small,
true details for Norris
when, two weeks later, he
reviews Louise Pool’s In a
Dike Shanty and praises
the novel for being “a
picture of life,” one which
gives the impression that
its author “actually lived
the life she writes
about. “ 2 8
In an editorial pub-
lished the following year,
Norris deplores the fact
that the best magazines
are not accepting the best
stories. Rather than the
names of Kipling, Arthur
Frank Norris Morrison, or Stephen
Crane, he argues, one sees only the too-familiar names of Brander Matthews,
Octave Thanet, Charles Dudley Warner, Thomas Janvier, and Ruth McEnery
Stuart. These good people, Norris indicates, died long ago, for “there is in
them no freshness, no originality, no vitality, no close, keen grip on life or
nature.’’29 In another editorial written at this time, “An Opening for
Novelists,” Norris makes his impassioned plea for a literature which is related
to and identified with the life that has immediacy and vitality for the writer.
Where, he asks, “is the man that shall get at the heart of us, the blood and
bones and fibre of us, that shall go a-gunning for stories up and down our
streets and into our houses and parlours and lodging houses and saloons and
dives and along our wharves and into our theatres . . . ?” He advises younger
writers to think of the short stories that are happening every hour: “Get hold of
them. . . grip fast upon the life of them. It’s the Life that we want, the
292 Journal of American Culture

vigorous, real thing, not the

curious weaving of words and
the polish of literary finish.
. . . Yes, . . . it’s the life that
lives; it’s reality, it’s the thing
that counts.
Norris’ letters echo many
of the attitudes expressed in
his contributions to The
Wuue. In a letter (March 14,
1899) to Isaac Marcosson,
literary editor of the Louisville
Times who had reviewed
McTeague, Norris writes:
“What pleased me most in
your review of ‘McTeague’
was the ‘disdaining all preten-
sions to style.’ It is precisely
what I try most to avoid. I
detest ‘finewriting,’ ‘rhetoric,’
‘elegant English,’- tommy-
rot. Who cares for fine style!
Tell your yarn and let your
style go to the devil. We don’t Theodore Dreiser
want literature, we want
life.”3’ Norris also writes a letter to William Dean Howells in which he
expresses his pleasure with the review of McTeague in the March 24,1899 issue
of Literature. Although Howells had indicated some critical dissatisfaction
with the novel (it was, he said, among other things, “a little inhuman . . . dis-
tinctly not for the walls of living rooms, where the ladies of the family sit and
the children go in and out . . . ”) , Norris is almost too eager to agree with him
that a novel which is true to life includes the whole truth. He writes: “I
believe . . . you were quite right in saying that it was not the whole truth, and
that the novel that is true to life cannot afford to avoid the finer things.”32
Another letter to Marcosson (between late 1899 and early 1900) reveals Norris’
plan to write a truthful novel of city life with San Francisco as its background
I have great faith in the possibilities of San Francisco and the Pacific Coast as offering a field for
fiction. Not the fiction of Bret Harte, however, for the country has long since outgrown the “red
shirt” period. The novel of California must be now a novel of city life, and it is that novel I hope
some day to write s u c ~ e s s f u l l y . ~ ~

Norris’ late essays, collected under the title The Responsibilities of the
Novelist, are valuable for their insights into his more mature reflections about
the relationship between literature and life. “The True Reward of the Novelist”
reminds the young writer that “to know the life around you you must live-if
not among people, then in people.”s‘ In “Novelists of the Future,” Norris
 Art for Truth’s Sake 293

maintains that the best study of mankind is man himself and not mere
academic exercises. “. . . from the study of your fellows,” he advises, “you
shall learn more than from the study of all the textbooks that ever will be
~ r i t t e n . ”He
~~insists that the obligation of the writer demands a willing and
sympathetic identification with life in all of its manifestations: “Of all the arts
it is the most virile; of all the arts it will not . . . flourish indoors. Dependent
solely upon fidelity to life for existence, it must be practiced in the very heart’s
heart of life, on the street comer, in the marketplace, not in the s t u d i e ~ . ’ In
’~~
another essay, “Women Should Write the Best Novels,” Norris continues to
emphasize the importance of actual life and actual experience for the writer. He
states that “life is better than literature” and that life itself, “the crude, the
raw, the vulgar,” must be studied. He argues, in this essay, that an hour’s
experience is worth ten years of study.37But few critics agreed with Norris’
belief in writing about life as he sees it. In “The Novel with a ‘Purpose’,’’
Norris attacks those critics who indict fiction that is concerned with injustice,
crime, and inequality: “If there is much pain in life, all the more reason that it
should appear in a class of literature which, in its highest form, is a sincere
transcription of life.”38
Under the general title of “Salt and Sincerity,” published in The Critic
during 1902, Norris wrote seven articles in which he continues to express many
of his views about art and life.3gHe comments upon the image of the Amiable
Young Girl so beloved in contemporary fiction, and he encourages writers to
depict a real flesh-and-blood woman. This woman would be “capable of faults,
mistakes, even of sins, [which] would not only be a refreshing contrast to the
present unending file of well-bred anaemic ladies, but would offer to the
novelist an opportunity of exercising all that he has of sincerity, ingenuity,
thoughtfulness, and w ~ r t h . ” Art‘ ~ and life, Norris emphasizes in other essays
in the same series, are so inextricably interwoven that one without the other is
meaningless.“ Two of these essays, “The Responsibilities of the Novelist” and
“The ‘Nature’ Revival in Literature,” were published posthumously. In the
first essay, Norris writes about the novelist as a “recorder” of civilization; this
idea is analogous to John Sloan’s view of the general function of the painter.
Writing, however, is more important than painting to Norris. Today, he
asserts in 1902, is the day of the novel. Therefore, he continues: “In no other
day and by no other vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed;
and the critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to
reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to the architects
nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our idio~yncrasy.”‘~ The second
essay compares “life” with “literature” and it concludes that life is better,
“even if the ‘literature’ be of human beings and the life be that of a faithful
dog.”43
Further insights into Norris’ attitude toward the relationship between life
and art are found in his “human interest” articles, in his short stories, and in
his novels. In one of the articles, “A ‘Lag’s’ Release,” an observation is made
on the value of “real life” for the writer: “Get it down as an axiom, as a law to
be carefully studied of writers of fiction, that the sensations of real life tend to
294 Journal of American Culture

the plane of the commonplace as inevitably as water seeks its level. Assume
that everything is ordinary till it has been proved otherwise.”“ In the short
story, “His Sister,” a young writer of sketches, Strelitz, is described as
searching for his literary material in the theater district, in the slums, and in
the Bowery. “As a rule,” Norris notes, “he avoided the aristocratic and formal
neighborhoods, knowing by instinct that he would be more apt to find
undisguised human nature along the poorer and unconventional thorough-
f a r e ~ ’In
’ ~the
~ same vein. the opening paragraph of the story, “The House with
the Blinds,” states that there are only three “story cities” in the United
States-New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Norris indicates the
particular qualities of the “life” in these cities which capture the artist’s
attention: “Here, if you put yourself in the way of it, you shall see life
uncloaked and bare of convention- the raw, naked thing, that perplexes and
fascinates-life that involves death of the sudden and swift variety, the jar and
shock of unleashed passions . . . ” I 6 “Dying Fires” is the story of Overbeck
and his first novel which shows traces of a great talent. Through his schooling
and his newspaper work the writer has learned to observe without, however,
dulling his sensitivity. The consequence is that “he saw into the life and the
heart beneath the life . . . ” Only when he loses his sincerity, honesty, and
vigor to “paint life as he saw it,” Norris points out, will his creative powers
decline and eventually die.”
Norris also expresses his attitudes toward the function of literature in his
novels. The young writer in Blix, for example, comes to the realization that
“life was better than literature.”48A passage in The Octopus, in which Presley
and Vanamee are described as “two strange men, the one a poet by nature, the
other by training, both out of tune with their world, dreamers . . . lost . . . at
the end-of-the-centurytime . . . [ ,]” may be interpreted as Norris’ criticism of
the social and cultural malaise in his own time.49When either individuals or
creative artists lose touch with reality, he is saying, they become hopelessly
lost themselves.
In a later novel, The Pit, the character of Laura reflects the conventional
tastes of the majority of Norris’ contemporaries, whereas Corthell, the artist,
represents Norris’ own avant-garde ideas. With obvious irony, Norris
juxtaposes his description of the drabness and desolation of the weather in the
jungle-world of Chicago with Laura’s rejection of a portrayal of black reality in
literature: one of the novels she has been reading is, she says, “an outlandish
story, no love story in it, and so coarse, so brutal, and then so improbable, I
couldn’t get interested.” When she reads a popular sentimental novel,
however, she is moved to tears since it is a story about noble and unselfish
people and it makes the reader feel elevated for having read it. Laura describes
Corthell, the artist who is unconventional in his artistic tastes, as “the kind of
man that gets up a reputation for being clever and artistic by running down the
very one particular thing that everyone likes, and cracking up some book or
picture or play that no one has ever heard of.” She has heard that Corthell
criticized Bougereau’s popular bathing nymphs, which Laura assumes should
be admired, while he has been known to express his enthusiasm for a landscape
 Art for Truth’s Sake 295

by an unknown Western artist for its feeling of “the tragedy of a life full of
dark, hidden secrets. ” 5 0
Norris, then, emphasizes his beliefs and attitudes about the nature and
problems of art in many of his articles, letters, essays, human interest stories,
short stories, and novels. He asserts the artist’s responsibility to establish an
intimate and honest relationship with all facets of life. That relationship, he
states with conviction, is an indispensable one.
Theodore Dreiser’s literary attitudes mirror Norris’ own preoccupations. A
Book about Myself describes an early crisis in Dreiser’s literary career. When,
in the late 1890’s, he was thinking of leaving newspaper work in New York, he
began a systematic study of Century, Scribner’s, Harper’s, and the other
popular magazines and discovered that their pages described life as suffused
with sweetness, beauty, success, and goodness. “I was never more
confounded,” he writes, “than by the discrepancy existing between my own
observations and those displayed here . . . the almost complete absence of any
reference to the coarse and the vulgar and the cruel and the terrible.”51The
split between the nature of reality and of a popular audience whose members
refuse to reconcile life with art, shocks him with terrible force and threatens to
abort his career as a writer: “Perhaps, as I now thought, life as I saw it, the
darker phases, were never to be written about. Maybe such things were not the
true province of fiction anyhow. . . . The kind of thing I was witnessing no one
would want as fiction.‘’6z
Dreiser persisted, nevertheless, and wrote his magazine articles and stories.
Then his first novel, Sister Carrie, was published in 1900 and almost
immediately suppressed. His awareness that he was out of the mainstream of
American life and literature is revealed in an article in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch (January 26, 1902) in which the novelist is reported as saying:
“ I have not tried to gloss over any evil any more than I have stopped to dwell
upon it. Life is too short; its phases are too numerous. What I desired to do
was to show little human beings, or more, playing in and out of the giant legs
of circumstance. Personally, I see nothing immoral in discussing with a clean
purpose any phase of life . . .”53 A letter of advice to Charles Fort, a short
story writer who contributed to Smith’s Magazine while Dreiser was editing it,
indicates that the author of Sister Carrie did not hesitate to encourage other
writers to select the “darker phases of life” for their literary material: “I think
the strongest vein for you to work at present would be that of the tenements,
and in particular, the water front . . . ” 5 4 When Sister Carrie was finally
republished in 1907, Dreiser was interviewed by a reporter from the New York
Times who quotes him as saying that “the mere living of your daily life” is
“drastic drama,” that his mere living is “intensely interesting,” and that his
own artistic intention is to record “life as it is.”55
Although Jack London had, at approximately this time, confided to Dreiser
in a saloon that “I’d like to write the real thing, but I can’t sell ’em,” Dreiser
continued to write about “life as it is” and, in 1911, Jennie Gerhardt was
published. When interviewed about his intentions in the novel, he states that
his “one ambition is to conform to the large truthful lines of life.”56During this
296 Journal of American Culture

period, while collecting material on Charles Yerkes, the unscrupulous financial

tycoon, for the writing of The Titan, Dreiser informs a reporter that “a literal
transcript of life as it is” would demand of his readers “a special kind of
guts.”6’
The most fully developed expression of Dreiser’s ideas and attitudes about
the relationship of art to life at this moment in his literary career, however,
appears in his introduction to a new edition of Lieutenant Bilse’s previously
suppressed book, Life in a Garrison Town, which was finally published in 1914.
In the introduction, he indicates the philosophical and aesthetic characteristics
of a truthful portrayal of life:
What we need, and what the sound intelligence of the world rejoices in, are true, unflinching pictures
or presentations of life done after and through a temperament which is artistically sound. These may
be conscious or unconscious; accidental or planned. What matter? Are they artistic? Real? Verifi-
able? Do they appeal to your instincts for verisimilitude-do they tally with your experience? Then
they are good art and the very best things that life can give you. They need not apotheosize life, and
in the last analysis do not. Life properly and artistically presented apotheosizes itself, and inciden-
tally its handmaiden, the artist. Life is great, it is beautiful, it is artistic. Give us a picture of it in its
balanced relation to other things and that picture is inherently beautiful and even thrilling.“
In his comments about the hypocritical and self-deceiving nature of the
American artist’s audience in 1914, Dreiser deplores a condition in which “the
plain ordinary facts of life are perpetually blinked at and people will not
tolerate in any artist a moving, honest representation of life as it is . . Art,
he argues so persistently, demands of the artist “an enthusiasm for life as a
picture” and the art work itself should be “ a balanced picturing of things as
they are.” Since “life is the thing we are all trying to delineate,” Dreiser
concludes that the greatest artist is one who includes, along with the smiling
aspects of life, both its terrors and its imperfections.60
The complex and picturesque life of the city plays a significant role in
Dreiser’s theoretical pronouncements upon the relationship of art to life. In his
introduction to The Color of a Great City (1923), he testifies to the unique
character of New York City and to his own attitude toward it from about 1900
to approximately 1915. During this early period, he notes that the city itself
was varied, and that it offered great social and financial contrasts. Dreiser, the
artist, has no difficulty remembering how he responded to its crowds and
streets, was fascinated by the colorful mixture of nationalities and neighbor-
hoods, and knew from first-hand experience “the meaner and poor aspects of
the city’s life.”61
Dreiser’s experiences in European cities, as revealed in A Traveler at Forty
(1914), lend an invaluable perspective on his similar reflections about the life of
New York City and on its meaning for his work as a writer. Passing through
the bleak industrial area of Cardiff, for example, he writes: “ I have the feeling
that the poor and the ignorant and the savage are somehow great artistically. I
have always had it. Millet saw it when he painted ‘The Man with the Hoe.’
These drab towns are grimly wonderful to me.”62He compares London’s East
End with New York’s lower East Side and notes that “the difference in crowds,
color, noise, life, was a s t o ~ n d i n g . ”The
~ ~ names of Victor Hugo and of the
major literary influence in Dreiser’s early career, Balzac, are associated with
 Art for Truth’s Sake 297

another great European city, Paris. Both writers, Dreiser comments, look
upon that city as the capital of the world; nevertheless, he adds, “I am afraid I
shall have to confess a similar feeling concerning New York. I know it so
well . . .”g4 Although Dreiser compares European life and temperament with
the life and style of the American, to the disadvantage of his own country, he
concludes that he prefers his native land and his adopted city:
America, and particularly New York, has to me the most comforting atmosphere of any. The
subway is like my library table-it is so much of an intimate. Broadway is the one idling show place.
Neither the Strand nor the Boulevard des Capucines can replace it. Fifth Avenue is all that it should
be-the one really perfect show street of the world. All in all the Atlantic metropolis is the first city
in the world to me,-first in force, unrivaled in individuality, richer and freer in its spirit than
London or Paris, though so often more gauche, more tawdry, more shamblingly inexperienced.“

In his sketch, “De Maupassant, J r . , ” Dreiser remembers the opposition to

Sister Carrie and to all his other work which attempted to depict life in America
both honestly and seriously: “One dared not ‘talk out loud,’ one dared not re-
port life as it was, as one lived it.”66He comments admiringly upon the subject
of his sketch, who disdains petty definitions and distinctions, since for him “all
life was fascinating, acceptable, to be interpreted if one had the skill . . . ” 6 7 In
contrast, another sketch, “Emanuela,” portrays its subject as a precious wo-
man who invites him to accompany her to an exhibition of paintings by Arthur
I?. Davies. Dreiser sensitively interprets Davies’ nudes: “Gracile nudes strewn
or draped like flowers on a starlit summer lawn. Lily-like nudes faltering here
and there in dreams or in sleep. Seeking and sensuous nudes straining upward
with their bodies and arms and faces like flowers, bodies and arms that seemed
to me to be seeking light and air, freedom and delight above the muddy and
dank repressions of the day or the world in which they found themselves.” This
experience gives Dreiser an opportunity to express his criticism of his
companion’s alienation from the world of reality:
“But how can you like such things, Emanuela?” I commented. “You know you have no interest in
the creative processes of life. Where men and women are concerned, you invariably evade or deny.
. . . You are always here and there looking a t God knows what-Eurythmic dancers, paintings like
these . . . But why? When it comes to reality, your personal relation to such things, you are not
there.”d’
In dramatic contrast to Dreiser’s negative attitude toward Davies’ ethereal
nudes, we see his appreciation of a begger as a subject of overwhelming interest
for the serious artist:
The beggar sitting by the roadside is dramatic. . . . I t is thrilling to see the way he ekes out a living.
Besides being dramatic life is beautiful. . . . The beggar just mentioned is beautiful. His dirt and his
rags, his bandaged feet and his sores are all beautiful to me. They may not be pleasant but they are
artistic.”

I11
That the pleasant and the artistic do not necessarily mesh is reflected in
James A . Herne’s drama, “Margaret Fleming” (1890), which unfolds a tale of
marital infidelity, and which was hailed by no one other than William Dean
Howells as “epoch-making. ” Very obviously, the distant shadow of Henrik
298 Journal of American Culture

Ibsen hovers over Herne’s dramatic practice and theory. Nevertheless, Heme’s
article, “Art for Truth’s Sake in the Drama” (1897), grapples with the state of
art in his own country a t the turn of the century, pointing up the tension
between the advocates of an “art for art’s sake” aesthetic and his own belief in
“art for truth’s sake”:
“Art for art’s sake” seems to me to concern itself principally with delicacy of touch, with skill. It
is aesthetic. It emphasizes beauty. I t aims to he attractive. I t must always be beautiful. It must
contain no distasteful quality. I t never offends. It is high-bred, so to speak. It holds that truth is
ugly. or at least is not always beautiful. The compensation of the artist is the joy of having produced
it.
“Art for truth’s sake,” on the other hand, emphasizes humanity. I t is not sufficient that the
subject be attractive or beautiful, or that it does not offend. I t must first of all express some large
truth. That is to say, it must always be representative. Truth is not always beautiful, but in art for
truth’s sake it is indispensable.”

Later in his article, Herne discusses the importance of this doctrine for his own
intentions: “ I stand for art for truth’s sake because it perpetuates the everyday
life of its time, because it develops the latent beauty of the so-called common-
places of life, because it dignifies labor and reveals the divinity of the common
man.””
Herne’s theoretical and personal defense of “art for truth’s sake” in the
world of the theatre expresses the theoretical and personal attitudes of the Am-
erican painters and writers in this study. They, too, emphasize their interest in
faith in humanity and are unconcerned about offending their audience. They,
too, are determined to express representative truths and wish to celebrate the
beauty of commonplace life. And they, too, aspire to dignify labor and to reveal
the dignity of the common man. I t is not, however, the shadow of the Norwe-
gian dramatist, or of any other alien creative figure, which hovers over their
beliefs.
The source, ultimately, of their faith in “art for truth’s sake” is found in the
theories and works of an indigenous cultural strain: the Emerson-Whitman
tradition of the nineteenth-century, a significant moment in American cultural
history.’* This tradition emphasizes the relationship between the artist, his
work, and his social, intellectual and cultural environment. Emerson, for ex-
ample, indicates his preference for a fresh intuition and celebrates a doctrine of
self-reliance; Whitman stresses the artist’s integrity and his faith in the
spontaneous expression of the emotions. Furthermore, Emerson feels that he is
near the very source of a r t in his enjoyment of the spectacle of men and women
a t work and play in common life; similarly, Whitman thinks of himself as the
poet of both the city and of nature. A t the turn of the century in America, these
attitudes and ideas, among others, struck a major response in Henri, Sloan,
Norris, Dreiser, and other contemporary and kindred spirits in the arts as well
as in social and intellectual thought. These figures were inspired to reject the
desiccated conception of the role of the creative artist and thinker as a n isolate
and, instead, to accept the idea of the creator as a forceful instrument for social
and cultural change within a “new” American community. The consequence,
historically, was that the doctrine of “art for truth’s sake” was revived. I t
 Art for Truth’s Sake 299

flourished, overtly and covertly, until the revolutionary impact of the Armory
Show in 1913 and the social and spiritual disenchantment with the failed pro-
mises of World War I made it suspect-and, perhaps, too painful t o acknow-
ledge-in many areas of American intellectual and cultural life. During the
following years it was ignored as an obsolete and unfashionable doctrine, and it
was not revived until the Great Depression of the 1930’s when “social-
consciousness” and “art for truth’s sake” became synonymous ideals.

Notes
’Guy Pene du Bois, “William Glackens, Normal Man: The Best Eyes in American Art,” Arts and
Decoration, 4 (September 19141, 404. William J. Glackens was closely identified throughout his life
with Henri and Sloan in his personal associations and, until approximately the First World War, in
his article theories and practice.
lQuoted in Giles Edgerton, “The Younger American Painters,” Craftsman, 13 (February 1908),
524.
SRobertHenri. “The New York Exhibition of Independent Artists,” Craftsman, 18 (May 1910).
161-62.
‘Robert Henri, “My People,” Craftsman, 27 (February 19151, 467.
‘Quoted in “W.J. Glackens: His Significance to the Art of His Day,” Touchstone, 7 (June 1920).
192.
Henri. The A r t Spirit (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 19391, p. 221.
’S.H., “Studio-Talk,” InternatwnalStudio, 30 (December 1906), 183.
OI am grateful, as in my previous publications, to the late John Sloan and to his widow, Mrs.
Helen Farr Sloan, for their cooperation and permission to read his then unpublished writings
(includinghis Diary and other manuscripts: they are presented in unedited form in this article).
sEverett Shinn, “Recollections of the Eight,” in The Eight (The Brooklyn Museum: Brooklyn
Institute of Arts and Sciences, Nov. 24, 1943-June 16, 1944), p. 22.
loGuy Pene du Bois, Artists Say the Silliest Things (New York: American Artists Group, Inc.,
D u d , Sloan & Pearce. Inc., 1940), p. 82.
“Ibid., p. 84.
”John Sloan, Gist ofArt, 2nd ed. (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 19441, p. 21.
Y3loan Diary, June 10, 1906. “Ibid., June 16, 1906.
I6Ibid.,March 9. 1907. I6Ibid., May 24, 1907.
“Ibid., July 13, 1907. “Ibid., July 21, 1907.
I9John Butler Yeats, “The Work of John Sloan,” Harper’s Weekly, 58 (November22,1913),20.
*“Ibid.,p. 21. “Sloan Diary, July 6, 1911.
lzSloan MS. Sloan indicates that when his intention was to say something about social, economic,
or political conditions, he made drawings and cartoons for The Masses, The Call, “and other directly
social vehicles.” Ibid.
‘%Ibid.,November 30, 1948. “Sloan MS.
26Sloan,Gist ofArt, p. 42. “Ibid., p. 106.
*7Quotedin Franklin Walker, Frank Norris (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran 8t Co.,
1932),p. 133.
*‘Frank Norris of “The Wave”, Stones 6t Sketches from the Sun Francisco Weekly, 1893 to 1897
(San Francisco: n.p.: Folcroft Press, 19311, pp. 143-44.
l0 Walker, p p . 145-46.
”Quoted in The CompleteEdition ofFrank Norris (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran &
Co., 1928), X , xii-xiii. Hereinafter referred to as Work ofNorris.
31Quoted in Isaac F. Marcosson, Adventures in Interviewing (New York: Dcdd. Mead &
Company, Inc., 19311, p. 235. Norris also indicates that although McTeague could have been set in
any big city, he had the impression that his next novel, Blix, could only take place in San Francisco.
300 Journal of American Culture

3*PaulH. Bixler, “Frank Norris’s Literary Reputation,” American Literature, 6 (May 1934),111.
SsQuotedin Marcosson, p. 234. S‘Work ofNorris, VII, 17.
s61bid.,p. 158. “Ibid., pp. 158-59.
”Ibid., pp. 179-80. $‘Ibid., p. 25.
ssOnly four were collected in The Responsibilities of the Novelist.
‘OFrank Norris, “Salt and Sincerity,” The Critic, 40 (June 1902),554-55.
“Cf. Work ofNorris, VII, 221,208. “Ibid., p. 4.
‘“bid., p. 108. “Ibid., X, 96.
“Frank Norris of “The Wave, “ p . 38. ‘*Work ofNorris, IV, 11.
“Ibid., pp. 113-27. “Ibid., 111, 124.
491bid.. I, 210. ‘Olbid., IX. 51752,236.
stTheodoreDreiser, A Book about Myself (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).p. 449.
bzIbid.,p. 491.
6 S Q ~ o t eind Dorothy Dudley, Dreiser and the Land of the Free (New York: The Beechhurst Press,
19461,p. 198.
“Dreiser letter to Charles Fort, August 11, 1905 (courtesy of University of Pennsylvania
Library).
66SeeRobert H. Elias, Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949),p. 138.
66Quotedin Dudley, p. 299. 6’Cf. Elias, p. 171.
“Lieutenant Bilse, Life in a Garrison Town (New York: John Lane Company, 1914),pp. v-vi.
6sIbid.,p. vii. 8oIbid.,pp. ix-xiii, passim.
“Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923),pp. v-x,
passim.
O*TheodoreDreiser, A Traveler at Forty (New York: Century. 1914t1p. 43.
esIbid.,p. 129. “Ibid., p. 311. ebIbid.,p. 312.
“Theodore Dreiser. TwelveMen (New York: Horace Liveright, 19261,p. 212.
6‘Ibid., p. 219.
e*TheodoreDreiser, A Gallery of Women (New York: H. Liveright, 1929),11, 690.
eeQuotedin Dudley, p. 381.
“Arena, 17 (February 1897).362. ”Ibid., p. 369.
’“or a more detailed discussion of this significant and pervasive theme, see my article, “Robert
Henri and the Emerson-Whitman Tradition,” PMLA, 71 (September 1956),617-36.