Critical Woodcuts/H. L. Mencken as Liberator
IN keeping house with from two to seven bickering personalities treading on one another's toes within the castle of his bones Mr. Mencken resembles the rest of humankind. For the outside observer, as well as for the beleaguered spirits, the most interesting question about the housekeeping is which one of the inmates is finally going to rule the roost. In this case attention may well center on the long contention between a reckless, callous, two-fisted grobianism and a being with "immortal longings" remotely akin to Heinrich Heine, who enjoined his heirs and assigns to lay on his coffin a sword—"for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity."
I am grateful to Mr. Mencken whenever he reminds me of Heine, and, as a matter of fact, he has done that more than once. If he did not, like Heine, live in mortal terror of betraying his "immortal longings," he would reveal them more frequently. Heine, my dogeared copy of his lyrics, my underscored copy of his travel books, his delicious book, "The Romantic School," his gay war on the professors, the preachers, the princelings of provincial Germany, his intoxicating sentiment, his tenderness toward the old traditions that he mocked—the grandmother sitting by the hearth; his infinite malice, his irony, his heart-breaking wit—Heine, the Jewish nightingale of Düsseldorf, the only German writer who ever thoroughly bewitched and enchanted me, curiously came back into my mind, from the intermittent exile of a quarter of a century, at the bidding of a gesture of Mr. Mencken to his flock and at the penny whistle piping of two or three pages at the end of his fourth series of "Prejudices," headed "Bilder aus schöner Zeit," jottings, merely, of things sweet to his memory, as thus:
The little pile of stones on the beach of Watling's Island, marking the place where Columbus landed. . . . The moon of the Caribbees, seen from a 1,000-ton British tramp. . . . A dull night in a Buffalo hotel, reading the American Revised Version of the New Testament. . . . The day I received the proofs of my first book. . . . A good-by on a Hoboken pier. . . . The Palace Hotel in Madrid.
When I read these pages I was touched, and I fell to thinking about Heine.
Was it because I too was brought up on the literature of Israel that I never had any difficulty in understanding Heine's humor, was never offended by it, even in its most irreverent sallies, and sympathized in the main heartily with his neo-paganism—his attempt to rediscover the goodness of this earthly life, and with all his efforts to free the Children of Light from Philistia's yoke, from the stodginess of missionary society culture and from the straitjacket of small-town theology?
Heine told me that the Quaker who bought up the loveliest mythological paintings of Giulio Romano in order to burn them deserved to be sent to heaven and whipped there every day for his pains. Heine wakened my apprehension of professors when he told me that the three greatest adversaries of Napoleon had "ended miserably: Castlereagh cut his own throat, Louis XVIII rotted upon his throne and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Göttingen." Heine told me that "to Goethe the Cross was as hateful as bugs, tobacco and garlic," and I understand why. Heine had spoken of the Virgin Mary as "the fair dame du comptoir of the Catholic Church, whose customers, especially the barbarians of the North, were attracted and spellbound by her heavenly smile." Heine told me that religion, by inculcating a houndlike humility, the rejection of all earthly goods and the renunciation of innocent pleasures, had "really brought sin and hypocrisy into the world." And I was not wounded by any of these things, because I felt myself to be, in my ethical and religious inheritance and in my sentiment for the history and poetry of the Chosen People, almost as much of a Jew as Heine, and because I was in the same boat with him, voyaging on the open sea of the modern spirit.
There is an obvious parallelism between the present line of Mr. Mencken's effort and the line of Heine, and it has set me to thinking over some of the reasons why when the later iconoclast began his critical jehad he did not bewitch and enchant me as Heine had done.
The first of these reasons Mr. Mencken himself has just given me by stating that he is a white, blond, Protestant Nordic and an excessively pure type of the Anglo-Saxon. I am no sworn lover of the Anglo-Saxon. Though I have occasionally quoted Mr. Dreiser's theorizings on the intolerable moral idealism of the "Anglo-Saxons," though, on due and sufficient provocation, I have twitted various persons for raising Semitic, Celtic and German banners against the Republic, I have always regarded these ethnological speculations as a morass full of will-o'—the wisps which were not worth chasing. On the one occasion when I did treat the subject respectfully—in a war tract of 1918—I dismissed Anglo-Saxonism as a banner of preposterous absurdity, and argued that the only banner under which the allied nations could possibly unite was the flag of mankind. The pure Anglo-Saxon, the white, blond, Protestant Nordic, has never been an object of my reverence. He never, as such, occupied ten minutes of my attention till I gave a course of lectures to prove my ancient conviction that in English literature at least he does not exist. Mr. Mencken, on the other hand, revels in ethnology, as he proves by his wild ramblings among the Celts and Saxons in this volume; and he does assert the existence among us, in very small numbers, of the pure Anglo-Saxon.
I snatch at this blond Nordicism of his to explain those characteristics of his work which least captivate me. The pure, unmodified Anglo-Saxon cannot be altogether like Heine. As Taine and others describe the Anglo-Saxon, he is a big white bulk of grobianism—a hard fighter, a hard eater, a hard drinker, a hard boaster, reverencing women but keeping them in the kitchen—a man, in short, with no sentiment or nonsense about him. When I first made acquaintance with Mr. Mencken's work, his juvenile addiction to Kipling and the American Navy and his long immersion in Friedrich Nietzsche had brought all his pure, elemental Anglo-Saxonism, including his Ur-Germanic grobianism, to the surface. In those days he uttered little soft stuff about "the civilized minority." His saving remnant was a hunting pack of horny-hearted supermen. He professed himself a Federalist. He was an atheist of the biological type. He celebrated glorious war, like a Prussian professor. He preached the gospel of Herrenmoral. He despitefully assigned women and negroes to the slave class. He emptied dishwater over pretty nearly the whole of American literature, treating with particular ignominy my heroes, the Abolitionists, the Transcendentalists, and the American pioneers of realism. He insulted my grandmother. And I found no compensation for that in his whooping it up for a type of modern German naturalism which had pleased me in my teens but which, when I had found better diet, I had come to loathe.
Mr. Mencken's Fourth Series is still deplorably rich in exulting grobianisms. He rarely faces an adversary, he never argues, he never meets a point, and he never uses one. The only weapons employed by this champion of the civilized minority are bricks and cabbages. But as he hurls these missiles at phantoms and puppets of his own ingenious manufacture, which generally bear no resemblance to the persons whose names he affixes to them, little blood is spilled. Along with these insignificant personal diatribes, he utters much humorous thunder in behalf of universal skepticism and anarchy. In the style with which we have grown quite familiar, he preaches contumacy toward God, the laws, the clergy, the politicians, the courts, the police, the professors, and the farmers; all this as the mark of a civilized minority. He denounces religion, poetry, and romantic love as lies and delusions which can impose on no man of intelligence after the age of thirty. He proclaims the bootlegger the hero of contemporary civilization; and he avows a yearning to see "the whole human race gently stewed," and thereby happy.
Of "cultural progress" in the Mid-West and the South he is somewhat despondent; but in New York City he sees cheering indications that multitudes have quite divested themselves of the fear of hell fire. "Compared to the revels that go on in New York every night," he declares, "the carnalities of the West End of Berlin are trivial and childish, and those of Paris and the Côte d'Azur take on the harmless aspect of a Sunday school picnic." New York contains the hope of a higher culture; it is now an "auction room and a bawdy house." We have now got all the freedom we need. There is no longer any earthly reason why American writers, at last relieved of the moralistic incubus, shouldn't settle down and produce a great literature!
Whether Mr. Mencken takes credit for having produced all these improvements—all this ripened spirit of contumacy and corruption—single-handed, I don't quite make out. It is clear, however, that he reviews with satisfaction his performance in a series of leading reles; some of which he has quite recently assumed. He sees himself, of course, as the principal "truth-seeker" of this generation. He now offers himself as the defender of the American tradition in letters, the tradition which includes Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman and Mark Twain—the defender of this tradition as against Mr. Matthews, Mr. Brownell and others of us who wish "to pass over all these men to embrace . . . N. P. Willis, J. G. Holland, Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Sigourney and the Sweet Singer of Michigan." He sees himself as the blond Nordic assailant of the blond Nordics. He views himself as the one undaunted voice of the civilized minority. He is the emancipator of the young from Mr. Comstock. He is the knight in shining armor going out against the prohibition demon. He is the man midwife of the naturalistic fiction which makes its bed in the parlor window.
There is not space here to extract the kernel of fact from the bushels of what he calls "pishposh" in which he loves to involve and invalidate all his criticism. I will give but a single illustration. On the soberest page of his book, page 285, he congratulates the young American literatus on the freedom which has been won for him since he, Mr. Mencken, assumed the "martyr's shroud" in 1908; and immediately thereafter he sketches the dreadful condition of American authorship in the period immediately preceding his advent. Before his appearance, he declares, "the American novelists most admired by most publishers, by most readers and by all practising critics were Richard Harding Davis, Robert W. Chambers and James Lane Allen. It is hard indeed, in retrospect, to picture those remote days just as they were. They seem almost fabulous."
Now my animadversions against Mr. Mencken as critic and historian of American letters have been evoked chiefly by the quality which is still regnant in the soberest page of this latest book: I mean his wholly uncritical and grobian callousness about the truth. The "fabulousness" of the decade prior to 1908 Mr. Mencken produces by bringing in H. W. Mabie and ignoring James and Howells, who are, of course, the real way-makers of our realistic fiction; and by bringing in Richard Harding Davis and leaving out Crane's "Red Badge of Courage," 1895; James's "What Maisie Knew," 1897; Frederic's "Damnation of Theron Ware," 1896; Norris's "McTeague," 1899, and "The Pit," 1902; Grant's "Unleavened Bread," 1900; Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth," 1905, and "The Fruit of the Tree," 1907; Sinclair's "Jungle," 1906; O. Henry's "Gentle Grafter," 1908; Herrick's "Together," 1908, not to speak of Mr. Mencken's isolated exception, Mr. Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," 1900. As an historian Mr. Mencken is to be viewed with alarm.
I have sworn to myself not to end this review on the note of detraction, but to bring it back to the note of sincere admiration on which it started. Though Mr. Mencken lacks the patience, the discrimination and the "organ for truth" which the critic of a "civilized minority" ought to possess, he has other great talents. He is, as I have said elsewhere, alive. He has been the occasion of life in others. He has a rare gift at stirring people up and making them strike an attitude, and at least start on the long process of becoming intelligent beings. And he is beginning to quote from good authors. He is beginning to quote shyly from the New Testament in the Latin of the Vulgate. What may that bode? No one who has followed his work as carefully and hopefully as I have these many years can have failed to recognize that his obvious calling is to some form of ministry. From the first, he has exhibited the desk-beating proclivities, the overstrained voice, the tumid phrases and the denunciatory fervor which one associates with the popular orator. Years ago I pointed out the absurdity of his presenting himself as chiefly an æsthetic interpreter when every drop of his blood seethes with moral passion and every beat of his heart summons him to moral propaganda. In his Fourth Series, when Mr. Mencken is not a theologian he is a moralist. His book is properly describable as a moral miscellany.
In the midst of its grobianism there are glimmers of better things. Mr. Mencken, to be sure, still attacks mob psychology with the weapons of the mob. He roars at the populace in the voice of the populace. He still identifies God with the universe, with nature, with the "cosmic process." And his popularity he has won in great part by a demagogic encouragement of the cosmic process, by hurrahing for the liberation in the populace of its natural grobianism. But his radical skepticism has got him half way out of that Serbonian bog. In a brief theological paragraph, entitled "The Goal," he announces that "the central aim of civilization, it must be plain, is simply to defy and correct the obvious intent of God!" He is right. So long as he defines God as he does, he is right. So long as he identifies God with unimproved Nature, it must be the central aim of civilization "to defy and correct the obvious intent of God." This God is careless, improvident, and lacks a heart.
If he follows that clew, he will inevitably return to the reality of religion, poetry and romantic love and to the sense of their necessity in the culture of a civilized minority. If he follows that clew he may eventually make plain that his faith in science, his allegiance to reason, his passion for music, his devotion to letters and learning and his increasing abomination for mass action and all impositions of brutal force—all the things that he cares most for are the religion, are the poetry of romantic lovers, created by them and held in existence by their fidelity. If Mr. Mencken does that, he will remind me still more of Heine and will strengthen his claim to the sword of a Liberator.