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Title: H. L. Mencken Author: Randolph Bourne Date: 1917 Language: en Topics: history Source: Retrieved on November 18, 2010 from http://fair-use.org/the-new-republic/1917/11/24/h-l-mencken Notes: from The New Republic, November 24, 1917
Mr. Mencken gives the impression of an able mind so harried and
irritated by the philistinism of American life that it has not been able
to attain its full power. These more carefully worked-over critical
essays are, on the whole, less interesting and provocative than the
irresponsible comment he gives us in his magazine. How is it that so
robust a hater of uplift and puritanism becomes so fanatical a crusader
himself? One is forced to call Mr. Mencken a moralist, for with him
appraisement has constantly to stop while he tilts against philistine
critics and outrageous puritans. In order to show how good a writer is,
he must first show how deplorably fatuous, malicious or ignorant are all
those who dislike him. Such a proof is undoubtedly the first impulse of
any mind that cares deeply about artistic values. But Mr. Mencken too
often permits it to be his last, and wastes away into a desert of
invective. Yet he has all the raw material of the good critic — moral
freedom, a passion for ideas and for literary beauty, vigor and pungency
of phrase, considerable reference and knowledge. Why have these
intellectual qualities and possessions been worked up only so partially
into the finished attitude of criticism? Has he not let himself be the
victim of that paralyzing Demos against which he so justly rages? As you
follow his strident paragraphs, you become a little sorry that there is
not more of a contrast in tone between his illumination of the brave,
the free, and the beautiful, and the peevish complaints of the
superannuated critics of the old school. When are we going to get
anything critically curative done for our generation, if our critical
rebels are to spend their lives cutting off hydra-heads of American
stodginess?
Mr. Mencken’s moralism infects the essay on Conrad perhaps the least.
With considerable effort the critic shakes himself loose from the
clutches of his puritan enemies and sets Conrad very justly in relation
to his time. “What he sees and describes in his books,” Mr. Mencken
says, “is not merely this man’s aspiration or that woman’s destiny, but
the overhwelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great
central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic
struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene
joking of the gods.” He likes Dreiser for the same reason, because “he
puts into his novels a touch of the eternal Weltschmerz. They get below
drama that is of the moment and reveal the greater drama that is without
end.” Mr. Mencken discusses Dreiser with admirable balance, and his
essay is important because it criticizes him more harshly and more
searchingly than many of us dare to do when we are defending him against
the outrageous puritan. The essay on Huneker is perhaps the most
entertaining. If “to be a civilized man in America is measurably less
difficult, despite the war, than it used to be, say, in 1890” (when Mr.
Mencken, by the way, was ten years old), it is to Mr. Huneker’s gallant
excitement that part of the credit is due.
Dreiser and Huneker Mr. Mencken used with the utmost lustiness, as
Samson used the jaw-bone, to slay a thousand Philistines, and his zeal
mounts to a closing essay on Puritanism as a Literary Force, which
employs all the Menckenian artillery. Here Mr. Mencken, as the moralist
contra moralism, runs amuck. It is an exposure that should stir our
blood, but it is so heavily documented and so stern in its conviction of
the brooding curtain of bigotry that hangs over our land, that its
effect must be to throw paralyzing terror into every American mind that
henceforth dares to think of not being a prude. Mr. Mencken wants to
liberate, but any one who took his huge concern seriously would never
dare challenge in any form that engine of puritanism which derives its
energy from the history and soul of the American people. Mr. Mencken is
much in earnest. His invective rises above the tone of scornful
exaggeration. But his despair seems a little forced. I cannot see that
the younger writers — particularly the verse-writers — are conscious of
living under any such cultural terrorism as he describes. Mr. Mencken
admits that the puritan proscription is irrational and incalculable in
its operation. Surely as long as there are magazines and publishers — as
there are in increasing numbers — who will issue vigorous and candid
work, comstockery in art must be seen as an annoying but not dominating
force. Mr. Mencken queerly shows himself as editor, of “a long list of
such things by American authors, well-devised, well-imagined,
respectable as human documents and as works of art — but never to be
printed in mine or any other American magazine.” But what is this but to
act as busy ally to that very comstockery he denounces? If the Menckens
are not going to run the risk, in the name of freedom, they are scarcely
justified in trying to infect us with their own caution.
The perspective is false that sees this persecution as peculiar to
America. Was not Lemonnier prosecuted in Paris? Did not Baudelaire,
Flaubert, Zola suffer? Did not Zola’s publisher in England die in
prison? Has not D. H. Lawrence’s latest novel been suppressed in England
before it had even a chance to be prosecuted here? It is England not
America that has an official censorship of plays. Comstockery is not so
much a function of American culture as it is of the current moralism of
our general middle-class civilization. The attack must be, as Nietzsche
made it, on that moralism rather than on its symptoms. But Mr. Mencken
is not particularly happy in his understanding of Nietzsche. He wrote
the book from which a majority of the Americans who know about Nietzsche
seem to have gotten their ideas. How crude a summary it is may be seen
by compariing it with the recent study of Nietzsche by another American,
W. M. Salter. One wishes Mr. Mencken had spent more time in
understanding the depth and subtleties of Nietzsche, and less on
shuddering at puritanism as a literary force, and on discovering how the
public libraries and newspaper reviewers are treating Theodore Dreiser.
Mr. Mencken’s mode of critical attack thus plays into the hands of the
philistines, demoralizes the artist, and demoralizes his own critical
power. Why cannot Demos be left alone for a while to its commercial
magazines and its mawkish novels? All good writing is produced in serene
unconsciousness of what Demos desires or demands. It cannot be created
at all if the artist worries about what Demos will think of him or do to
him. The artist writes for that imagined audience of perfect
comprehenders. The critic must judge for that audience too.