From PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 246–47.
First printed in the Smart Set, May, 1919, p. 49
I TAKE the following from the Boston Herald of May 1,1882:
A beautiful floral book stood at the left of the pulpit, being spread out on a stand.… Its last page was composed of white carnations, white daisies and light-colored immortelles. On the leaf was displayed, in neat letters of purple immortelles, the word “Finis.” This device was about two feet square, and its border was composed of different colored tea-roses. The other portion of the book was composed of dark and light-colored flowers.… The front of the large pulpit was covered with a mass of white pine boughs laid on loosely. In the center of this mass of boughs appeared a large harp composed of yellow jonquils.… Above this harp was a handsome bouquet of dark pansies. On each side appeared large clusters of calla lilies.
Well, what have we here? The funeral of a Grand Exalted Pishposh of the Odd Fellows, of a venerable Tammany leader, of an aged and much respected brothel-keeper? Nay. What we have here is the funeral of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was thus that the Puritan Kultur mourned its philosopher.
Poe
From THE NATIONAL LETTERS, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES,
1920, pp. 59–63
IT would certainly seem reasonable for a man of so forceful a habit of mind as Poe, and of such prodigal and arresting originality, to have founded a school in his own country, but a glance at the record shows that he did nothing of the sort. Immediately he was dead, the shadows of the genteel Irving tradition closed around his tomb, and for nearly thirty years thereafter all his chief ideas went disregarded. If, as the literature books argue, Poe was the father of the American short story, then it was a posthumous child, and had step-fathers who did their best to conceal its true parentage. When it actually entered upon the vigorous life that we know today Poe had been dead for a generation. Its father, at the time of its belated adolescence, seemed to be Bret Harte—and Harte’s debt to Dickens was vastly more apparent than his debt to Poe. What he got from Poe was probably essential, but he himself seems to have been unaware of it. It remained for foreign criticism, and particularly for French criticism, to lift Poe to the secure place that he now holds.
It is true enough that he enjoyed, during his lifetime, a certain popular reputation, and that he was praised by such men as N. P. Willis and James Russell Lowell, but that reputation was considerably less than the fame of men who were much his inferiors, and that praise, especially in Lowell’s case, was much corrupted by reservations. Not many native critics of respectable position, during the 50s and 60s, would have ranked him clearly above, say, Irving or Cooper, or even above Longfellow, his old enemy. A few partisans argued for him, but in the main, as Saintsbury once said, he was the victim of “extreme and almost incomprehensible injustice” at the hands of his countrymen. It is surely not without significance that it took ten years of effort to raise money enough to put a cheap and hideous tombstone upon his neglected grave in Baltimore, that it was not actually set up until he had been dead twenty-six years, that no contemporary American writer took any part in furthering the project, and that the only one who attended the final ceremony was Whitman.
It was Baudelaire’s French translation of the prose tales and Mallarmé’s translation of the poems that brought Poe to Valhalla. The former, First printed in 1856, founded the Poe cult in France, and during the two decades following it flourished amazingly. It was one of the well-springs, in fact, of the whole so-called decadent movement. If Baudelaire, the father of that movement, “cultivated hysteria with delight and terror,” he was simply doing what Poe had done before him. Both, reacting against the false concept of beauty as a mere handmaiden of logical ideas, sought its springs in those deep feelings and inner experiences which lie beyond the range of ideas and are to be interpreted only as intuitions. Emerson started upon the same quest, but was turned off into mazes of contradiction and unintelligibility by his ethical obsession—the unescapable burden of his Puritan heritage. But Poe never wandered from the path. You will find in “The Poetic Principle” what is perhaps the clearest statement of this new and sounder concept of beauty that has ever been made—certainly it is clearer than any ever made by a Frenchman. But it was not until Frenchmen had watered the seed out of grotesque and vari-colored pots that it began to sprout. The tide of Poe’s ideas, set in motion in France in the second half of the century, did not wash England until the last decade, and in America, save for a few dashes of spray, it has yet to show itself. There is no American writer who displays the influence of this most potent and original of Americans so clearly as whole groups of Frenchmen display it, and whole groups of Germans, and even a good many Englishmen.
What we have from Poe at first hand is simply a body of obvious yokel-shocking, with the tales of Ambrose Bierce as its finest flower—in brief, an imitation of Poe’s externals without any comprehension whatever of his underlying aims and notions. What we have from him at second hand is a somewhat childish Maeterlinckism, a further dilution of Poe-and-water. This Maeterlinckism got itself intermingled with the Whitmanic stream flowing back to America through the channel of French Imagism, with results destructive to the sanity of earnest critics and fatal to the gravity of those less austere. It is significant that the critical writing of Poe, in which there lies most that was best in him, has not come back; no normal American ever thinks of him as a critic, but only as a poet, as a raiser of goose-flesh, or as an immoral fellow. The cause thereof is plain enough. The French, instead of borrowing his critical theory directly, deduced it afresh from his applications of it; it became criticism of him rather than by him. Thus his own speculations lacked the authority of foreign approval, and consequently made no impression. The weight of native opinion was naturally against them, for they were at odds, not only with its fundamental theories, but also with its practical doctrine that no criticism can be profound and respectable which is not also dull.
“Poe,” says Arthur Ransome, in his capital study of the man and the artist, “was like a wolf chained by the leg among a lot of domestic dogs.” The simile here is somewhat startling, and Ransome, in a footnote, tries to ameliorate it. The “domestic dogs” it refers to were Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and Emerson.
Whitman
From the same, pp. 63–65. With additions from THE FRINGES OF
LOVELY LETTERS, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES, 1926, pp. 202–08
NOTHING could be more indecent (or more American) than the hostility which surrounded Whitman at home until the end of his long life. True enough, it was broken by certain feeble mitigations. Emerson, in 1855, praised him—though later, when he came under active fire, was very eager to forget it and desert him, as Clemens and Howells, years afterward, deserted Gorky. Alcott, Thoreau, Lowell and even Bryant, during his brief Bohemian days, were more or less polite to him. A group of miscellaneous enthusiasts gradually gathered about him, and out of this group emerged at least one man of some distinction, John Burroughs. Young adventurers of letters—for example, Huneker—went to see him and hear him, half drawn by genuine admiration and half by mere deviltry. But the general tone of the opinion that beat upon him, the attitude of domestic criticism, was unbrokenly inimical; he was opposed by misrepresentation and neglect. “The prevailing range of criticism on my book,” he wrote in “A Backward Glance on My Own Road” in 1884, “has been either mockery or denunciation—and … I have been the marked object of two or three (to me pretty serious) official buffetings.” “After thirty years of trial,” he wrote in “My Book and I,” three years later, “public criticism on the book and myself as author of it shows marked anger and contempt more than anything else.”
Down to the time of his death the prevailing American doctrine was that he was a third-rate poet and a dirty fellow. Any young professor who, in the 70s or even in the early 80s, had presumed to whoop for him in class would have been cashiered at once, as both incompetent and immoral. Indeed, if there was anythin
g definitively established in those days, it was that old Walt was below the salt. But today he is taught to sophomores everywhere, perhaps even in Tennessee, and everyone agrees that he is one of the glories of the national letters. Has that change been brought about by a purely critical process? Does it represent a triumph of criticism over darkness? It does not. It represents, rather, a triumph of external forces over criticism. Whitman’s first partisans were not interested in poetry; they were interested in sex, and perhaps especially in homosexuality. They were presently reënforced by persons interested in politics. They were finally converted into a majority by a tatterdemalion horde of persons interested mainly, and perhaps only, in making a noise.
Literary criticism, properly so-called, had little if anything to do with this transformation. Scarcely a critic of any recognized authority had a hand in it. What started it off, after the first furtive, gingery snuffling over “A Woman Waits for Me” and the “Calamus” cycle, was the rise of political radicalism in the early 80s, in reaction against the swinish materialism that followed the Civil War. I am tempted to say that Terence V. Powderly had more to do with the rehabilitation of Whitman than any American critic, or, indeed, than any American poet. And if you object to Powderly, then I offer you Karl Marx. The redicals made heavy weather of it at the start. To the average respectable citizen they seemed to be mere criminals. What they needed, obviously, was some means of stilling the popular fear of them—some way of tapping the national sentimentality. There stood Whitman, conveniently to hand. In his sonorous strophes to an imaginary and preposterous democracy there was an eloquent statement of their own vague and windy yearnings, and, what is more, a certificate to their virtue as sound Americans. So they adopted him with loud hosannas, and presently he was both their poet and their philosopher. Long before any professor at Harvard dared to mention him (save, perhaps, with lascivious winks), he was being read to tatters by thousands of lonely Socialists in the mining-towns. As radicalism froze into Liberalism, and so began to influence the intelligentsia, his vogue rose, and by the end of the century even school-teachers had begun to hear of him. There followed the free verse poets, i.e., a vast herd of emerging barbarians with an itch to make an uproar in the world, and no capacity for mastering the orthodox rules of prosody. Thus Whitman came to Valhalla, pushed by political propagandists and pulled by literary mountebanks.
Memorial Service
From PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 249–50.
First printed in the Smart Set, June, 1919, p. 45
LET us summon from the shades the immortal soul of James Harlan, born in 1820, entered into rest in 1899. In the year 1865 this Harlan resigned from the United States Senate to enter the Cabinet of Abraham Lincoln as Secretary of the Interior. One of the clerks in that department, at $600 a year, was Walt Whitman, lately emerged from the three years of service as an army nurse during the Civil War. One day, discovering that Whitman was the author of a book called “Leaves of Grass,” Harlan ordered him incontinently kicked out, and it was done forthwith. Let us remember this event and this man; he is too precious to die. Let us repair, once a year, to our accustomed houses of worship and there give thanks to God that one day in 1865 brought together the greatest poet that America has ever produced and the damndest ass.1
Footnote
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 9, 1929
THE REAL objection to Whitman is that he was a vulgar and trashy fellow. He wrote “A Woman Waits for Me.” A civilized man would have put the in place of a.
Credo
From the Smart, Set, Feb., 1913, P.152
I BELIEVE that “Huckleberry Finn” is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of “Don Quixote” and “Robinson Crusoe” that it is vastly better than “Gil Blas,” “Tristram Shandy,” “Nicholas Nickleby” or “Tom Jones.” I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, and over and over and over again, long after every book written in America between the years 1800 and 1860, with perhaps three exceptions, has disappeared entirely save as a classroom fossil. I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations. I believe that, admitting all his defects, he wrote better English, in the sense of cleaner, straighter, vivider, saner English, than either Irving or Hawthorne. I believe that four of his books – “Huck,” “Life on the Mississippi,” “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” and “A Connecticut Yankee” – are alone worth more, as works of art and as criticisms of life, than the whole output of Cooper, Irving, Holmes, Mitchell, Stedman, Whittier and Bryant. I believe that he ranks well above Whitman and certainly not below Poe. I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal.
The Man Within
From the Smart Set, Oct., 1919, pp. 139–43
THE BITTER, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, the noblest, the grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God’s green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one a awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weakness, his minute traces of vice and depravity. Mark, alas, had them: he was as thoroughly American as a Knight of Phthias, a Wheeling stogie, or Prohibition. One might almost exhibit his effigy in a museum as the archetype of the Homo americanus. And what were these stigmata that betrayed him? In chief, they were two in number, and both lay at the very foundation of his character. On the one had, there was his immovable moral certainty, his firm belief that he knew what was right from what was wrong, and that all who differed from him were, in some obscure way, men of an inferior and sinister order. And on the other had, there was his profound intellectual timorousness, his abiding fear of his own ideas, his incurable cowardice in the face of public disapproval. These two characteristics colored his whole thinking; they showed themselves in his every attitude and gesture. They were they visible sings of his limitation as an Emersonian Man Thinking, and they were the bright symbols of his nationality. He was great in every way that an American could be great, but when he came to the border of his Americanism he came to the end of his greatness.
The true Mark Twain is only partly of view in his actual books—that is, in his printed books. The real Mensch was not the somewhat heavy-handed satirist of “A Tramp Abroad” and “Tom Sawyer”. He was not even the extraordinarily fine and delicate artist of “Joan of Arc” and “Huckleberry Finn.” Nay, he was a different bird altogether—an intensely serious and even lugubrious man, an iconoclast of the most relentless sort, a man not so much amused by the spectacle of life as appalled by it, a pessimist to the last degree. Nothing could be more unsound than the Mark legend—the legend of the lighthearted and kindly old clown. The real Mark was a man haunted to the point of distraction by the endless and meaningless tragedy of existence—a man whose thoughts turned to it constantly, in season and out of season. And to think, with him, was to write; he was, for all his laziness, the most assiduous of scribblers; he piled up notes, sketches of books and articles, even whole books, about it, almost mountain high.
Well why did these notes, sketches, articles and books get no further? why do most of them remain unprinted even today? You will find the answer in a prefatory note that Mark appended to “What Is Man?” published privately in 1905. I quote it in full:
The studies for these papers were begun twenty-five or twenty-seven years ago. The papers were written seven years ago. I have examined them once or twice per year since and found them satisfactory. I have just examined than again, and am still satisfied that they speak the truth. Ev
ery thought in them has been thought (and accepted as unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men—and concealed, kept private. Whey did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other.
Imagine a man writing so honest and excellent a book, imagine him examining it and re-examining it and always finding it good—and yet holding off the printing of it for twenty-five years, and then issuing it timorously and behind the door, in an edition of 250 copies, none of them for sale. Even his death did not quench his fear. His executors, taking it over as part of his goods, withheld the book for five years more—and then printed it very discreetly, with the betraying preface omitted. Surely it would be impossible in the literature of any other civilized country since the Middle Ages to find anything to match that long hesitation. Here was a man of the highest dignity in the national letters, and here was a book into which he had put the earnest convictions of his lifetime, a book carefully and deliberately written, a book representing him more accurately than any other, both as artist and as man—and yet it had to wait thirty-five years before it saw the light of day. An astounding affair, in all conscience—but thoroughly American, Messieurs, thoroughly American. Mark knew his countrymen. He knew their intense suspicion of ideas, their blind hatred of heterodoxy, their bitter way of dealing with dissenters. He knew how, their pruderies outraged, they would turn upon even the gaudiest hero and roll him in the mud. And knowing, he was afraid. He “dreaded the disapproval of the people around him’. But part of that dread, I suspect, was peculiarly internal. In brief, Mark himself was also an American, and he shared the national horror of the unorthodox. His own speculations always half appalled him. He was not only afraid to utter what he believed; he was even a bit timorous about believing what he believed.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 55
