direction here, as becomes evident when, in The Titan, he reflects on the limitations of the woman as artwork: “He had little faith in the ability of
women aside from their value as objects of art” ( Titan, 118). At bottom, as Dreiser makes clear, the Cowperwood drive, a relentless will to acquire and
135
m i l e s o rv e l l
possess, is insatiable. Like Sister Carrie (though in other ways so different), Cowperwood’s yearning is the essence of the character, and women and artworks are subsumed equally under the sign of the titan’s acquisitiveness:
“Truth to say, he must always have youth, the illusion of beauty, vanity in
womanhood, the novelty of a new, untested temperament, quite as he must
have pictures, old porcelain, music, a mansion, illuminated missals, power,
the applause of the great, unthinking world” ( Titan, 201).
Cowperwood’s art collection serves yet another purpose as well, which
he articulates toward the end of The Stoic, in separate conversations with Aileen and Berenice. To Aileen, he tries to explain what his art collection
has meant to him: “It has helped me to live through the endless practical
problems to which I have had to devote myself. In building it and buying
things for it, I have tried to bring into my life and yours the beauty which
is entirely outside of cities and business” ( Stoic, 256). The collection has, in short, been an escape, a refuge, a place where the spirit can renew itself
apart from the gladiatorial commercial arena. And he reiterates this thought
to Berenice a few pages later: “To leave the asphalt of Fifth Avenue and in
ten seconds, after crossing the threshold, to be within a palm garden, walk
through flowers and growing things, sit down among them, hear the plash
of water, the tinkle of a rill dropping into the little pool, so that I heard notes of water music, like a brook in the cool greenness of the woods – ” ( Stoic, 264).
What Cowperwood expresses here is an opposition between the world
of art and the “real” world – the world of cities, of streets, of business.
The artwork evokes the dreamy garden, the idyllic shelter, the picturesque –
anything but the sublime forces of nature or the gritty struggles of city and
industry. Cowperwood’s art is, in terms of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, a part of the Aesthetic Movement, which celebrated the
beauty of the female form, which cultivated the refined sensation, which
dreamed of a synthesis of aesthetic elements, which saw art as an end in
itself, the creation of the ideal imagination, which looked back to mythical
and religious icons for inspiration. The Cowperwood aesthetic is not, in
other words, anything at all related to the realism of the Ashcan painters,
to the urban realists, to Whitman or the early American modernists who
were trying to find in the raw experience of American life – the streets, cities, and industry – the materials of a new art. Or, to put it another way, Frank
Cowperwood would not have collected Eugene Witla. But then, Witla does
take a turn toward the dreamy toward the end of The “Genius” , and perhaps this work would not be alien to Cowperwood’s aesthetic ideals.
Then how, we might wonder, is the Cowperwood aesthetic related to
the Dreiser aesthetic? After all, in creating this supreme business novel, the
136
Dreiser, art, and the museum
Trilogy of Desire, Dreiser was immersing himself in the worlds of business and the city and finding there the materials of art – but not the kind of art
his hero, looking for an escape from this world, would have appreciated.
Dreiser’s art is more like the early work of Witla, creating the highest art
out of the “commonplace” materials of everyday life and observation, out
of the very commercial life of the cities that his collector hero would wish
to escape. Dreiser himself, we must finally say, embodies the same tension
between the real and the ideal: for while we associate Dreiser with the group
of American realists and naturalists who were finding the materials of art in
the growing cities of America, Dreiser also is impelled toward the escapist
dreaminess of an aesthetic that detaches itself from reality, one that looks
back at the earth from a perspective that sees all of human life and effort
as a part of the vanity of existence. Certainly at the end of The Stoic, after Cowperwood dies, Berenice achieves that perspective, awakened (after a trip
to India) to the desperation of poverty and misery and driven thereby to try
to alleviate it as much as possible. Her sympathy with the poor and with the
life forces that govern existence moves her toward charity and away from
the self-satisfying ethic that governed Cowperwood’s life. Dreiser’s empathy,
a source of his own creative imagination, thus seems to resurface at the end
of the Cowperwood trilogy in terms that might recall parts of Sister Carrie.
Dreiser seems to have imagined Cowperwood initially as having a
“humane and democratic spirit” in the first volume of the trilogy, though he is
“primarily an egoist and intellectual” ( Financier, 134). And despite his ruthless pursuit of power through the length of these volumes, the financier re-
turns at the end to something of this sentiment for humanity. Cowperwood’s
own posthumous plans for his vast estate and supreme collection of artworks
(Dreiser tells us it might be the finest private collection in the nation) is to maintain his mansion as a museum, open to the public to enjoy, a place where
the common man might himself, perhaps, find an escape from a world that
is otherwise oppressive – oppressive, we might say, as a result of the very
industrial and urban projects that the Cowperwoods of America were fash-
ioning. Of course the Cowperwood Museum never materializes: it is part of
the irony of the trilogy that the financier’s great estate, not entirely secure from his ravenous rivals, is in the end auctioned off and comes to nothing.
Unlike, say, the Frick Museum, and a dozen other great private collections,
the Cowperwood holdings are dispersed.
If the first rule of American capitalism is that great wealth must appear
to possess great moral worth, the final irony of Dreiser’s trilogy is his final subversion of that rule. And we might understand this irony better by appreciating the unique place that the museum represents in American society, as
a nexus of art and money, of private aggrandizement and public grandeur.
137
m i l e s o rv e l l
In his “Gospel of Wealth” Andrew Carnegie posited a principle that some,
at least, would be willing to follow: that the best use of surplus wealth was
not to pass it on to one’s family; neither was it to leave it to the state or
to the whims of fortune following one’s death; rather, it was to devote it
thoughtfully to projects that will benefit the general public, thus placing
a halo of beneficence around capitalism and sustaining the ethos of indi-
vidualism that stood in opposition to the forces of communism in the late
nineteenth century. For Carnegie, the establishment of public libraries best
served that purpose, and he endowed them by the score throughout the
United States. But the founding of a museum (or the donation of a collection
to one) represented a particularly attractive response to Carnegie’s appeal, a
grand compromise for the wealthy, allowing them to give to the public while
at the same time preserving their own cultural capital in the form of their
good name, attached to the bequest of a collection, or better yet to a distinct museum of one’s own. (“The thing for him to do,” Cowperwood thinks at
one point in The Financier, “was to get rich and hold his own – to build up a seeming of virtue and dignity which would pass muster for the genuine
thing” [Dreiser, Financier, 135].)
Museums of art had a peculiar alchemical quality as well: they allowed
the donor to associate his own financial career with the idealistic aura of
art, thus transforming the baser metals of commerce into the gold of artis-
tic excellence. The great fortunes that were accumulated in the hands of a
relative few toward the end of the nineteenth century were the reward for
building the infrastructures of our cities, the prodigious manufacturing out-
put of our factories, the seemingly limitless energy sources required to run
everything from light bulbs to factories. But it is no secret that the means
used to achieve these ends were not often angelic and required moreover the
cooperation of legislative and governing bodies. As Gustavus Myers put it
in his classic study of American wealth, “Before about the year 1910 money
magnates, battling with much hostile opinion, believed in the corrupt use
of money to overcome it. To procure necessary legislation, to strangle in-