burgh" that commended an elegiac treatment of small-town themes to writers less wholeheartedly committed to literary realism (although they too, many of them, could write realistically about small towns, even bitingly, whenever they chose). Dreiser may have rejected the elegiac mode for himself, but he shared the emotions and, more important, the preconceptions underlying it. In their apparent rejection of nostalgia, his observations on this point represent a classic statement of the nostalgic attitude.
____________________The very soil smacked of American idealism and faith, a fixedness in sentimental and purely imaginative American tradition, in which I, alas! could not share.... I had seen Lithuanians and Hungarians in their "courts and hovels," I had seen the girls of [Pittsburgh] walking the streets at night. This profound faith in God, in goodness, in virtue and duty that I saw here [in rural Missouri] in no wise squared with the craft, the cruelty, the brutality and envy that I saw everywhere else. [Small-town people] were gracious and God-fearing, but to me they seemed asleep. They did not know life—could not.... They were as if suspended in dreams, lotus eaters. *
| * | Compare Wordsworth's sharply contrasting account of his residence in London, which exposed him to the same depravity and squalor that horrified Dreiser but left his youthful ideals intact. If anything, those ideals shone more brightly, Wordsworth says, when set off "by this portentous gloom."
Dreiser's experience of the city made the world of his boyhood seem like a dream. Wordsworth's account, on the other hand, stressed the continuity of his experience and the moral and imaginative sustenance he continued to draw from "early feelings." |
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