Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  The psychological history of the differentiation I need not go into here; its springs lie obviously in the greater physical strength of man and his freedom from child-bearing, and in the larger mobility and capacity for adventure that go therewith. A man dreams of utopias simply because he feels himself free to construct them; a woman must keep house. In late years, to be sure, she has toyed with the idea of escaping that necessity, but I shall not bore you with arguments showing that she never will. So long as children are brought into the world and made ready for the trenches, the assembly-line and the gallows by the laborious method ordained of God she will never be quite as free to roam and dream as man is. It is only a small minority of her sex who cherish a contrary expectation, and this minority, though anatomically female, is spiritually male. Show me a woman who has visions comparable, say, to those of Swedenborg or Strindberg, and I’ll show you a woman who is a very powerful anaphrodisiac.

  Thus women, by their enforced preoccupation with the harsh facts of life, are extremely well fitted to write novels, which must deal with the facts or nothing. What they need for the practical business, in addition, falls under two heads. First, they need enough sense of social security to make them free to set down what they see. Secondly, they need the modest technical skill, the formal mastery of words and ideas, necessary to do it. The latter, I believe, they have had ever since they learned to read and write, say 300 years ago; it comes to them more readily than to men, and is exercised with greater ease. The former they are fast acquiring. In the days of Aphra Behn and Ann Radcliffe it was almost as scandalous for a woman to put her observations and notions into print as it was for her to show her legs; even in the days of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë the thing was regarded as decidedly unladylike. But now, within certain limits, she is free to print whatever she pleases, and many women novelists begin to do it.

  I should like to read a “Main Street” by an articulate Carol Kennicott, or a “Titan” by one of Cowperwood’s mistresses. It would be sweet stuff, indeed.… And it will come.

  The Face Is Familiar

  From ESSAY IN PEDAGOGY, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES, 1926, pp. 218–36

  A first-rate novel is always a character sketch. It may be more than that, but at bottom it is always a character sketch, or, if the author is genuinely of the imperial line, a whole series of them. More, it is a character sketch of an individual not far removed from the norm of the race. He may have his flavor of oddity, but he is never fantastic; he never violates the common rules of human action; he never shows emotions that are impossible to the rest of us. If Thackeray had given Becky Sharp a bass voice, nine husbands and the rank of lieutenant-general in the British Army, she would have been forgotten long ago, along with all the rest of “Vanity Fair.” And if Robinson Crusoe had been an Edison instead of a normal sailorman, he would have gone the same way.

  The Hero Problem

  From the Smart Set, Dec, 1912, pp. 156–57

  It is seldom, indeed, that fiction can rise above second-rate men. The motives and impulses and processes of mind of the superman are too recondite for plausible analysis. It is easy enough to explain how John Smith courted and won his wife, and even how William Jones fought and died for his country, but it would be impossible to explain (or, at any rate, to convince by explaining) how Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony, or how Pasteur reasoned out the hydrophobia vaccine, or how Stonewall Jackson arrived at his miracles of strategy. The thing has been tried often, but it has always ended in failure. Those supermen of fiction who are not mere shadows and dummies are supermen reduced to saving ordinariness. Shakespeare made Hamlet a comprehensible and convincing man by diluting that half of him which was Shakespeare by a half which was a college sophomore. In the same way he saved Lear by making him, in large part, a silly and obscene old man—the blood brother of any average ancient of any average English taproom. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued from disaster by Brutus’s knife. George Bernard Shaw, facing the same difficulty, resolved it by drawing a composite portrait of two or three London actor-managers and half a dozen English politicians.

  New England Twilight

  From THE NATIONAL LETTERS, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 19–20

  One never remembers a character in the novels of those aloof and de-Americanized Americans of the New England decadence; one never encounters an idea in their essays; one never carries away a line out of their poetry. It is literature as an academic exercise for talented grammarians, almost as a genteel recreation for ladies and gentlemen of fashion—the exact equivalent, in the field of letters, of Eighteenth Century painting and German Augenmusik. What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through it, and characterizing the work of almost every man and woman producing it, there is an unescapable suggestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such—of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them. This purpose, naturally enough, most commonly shows a moral tinge. The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts—not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man. The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it only when it is broken to moral uses—in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

  XV. EUROPEAN NOVELISTS

  Jane Austen

  A hitherto unpublished note

  IT WAS NOT until the Spring of 1945, when I was approaching 65, that I ever came to Jane Austen. My choice, naturally, was “Mansfield Park,” for all the authorities seemed to agree that it was Jane’s best. And what did I find? A dull novel about a stupid group of English country gentry, almost on the level of the sentimental serials that the Ladies’ Home Journal used to publish in the ’90s. The characters, to be sure, had a certain definition, and were thus better done than the cut-outs in the popular English novel of the generation immediately preceding, but it would surely be going too far to call them quite plausible. Their doings, at least half the time, seemed to me to be without logical motive, and in consequence the enrolling episodes were often pointless. Such poor sticks, no doubt, existed in the English hinterland of the period, but I could discern no reason, save the historical one, for being interested in them today. Most of the official critics praise La Austen lavishly for the naturalness of her dialogue, but I found nothing of the sort in it. On the contrary, it was extraordinarily stiff and clumsy, and even in moments of high passion the people of the tale had at one another with set speeches, many of them so ornate as to be almost unintelligible. I got as far as Chapter XXXIX and then had to give up, thus missing altogether the elopement of Crawford and Mrs. Rushworth. It was a somewhat painful experience, and I had to console myself with the reflection that novel-writing has made enormous progress since the first days of the Nineteenth Century. The veriest tyro of today creates characters who are far better observed, if not better imagined, and the worst dialogue perpetrated by an imitator of Ernest Hemingway is at least more natural than poor Jane’s. Yet there have been literary historians, not palpably insane, who have ventured to argue that “Mansfield Park” is the greatest of English novels. If so, then Tom Robertson’s “Caste” is the greatest of English plays.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  From the American Mercury, Nov., 1924, pp. 378–80.

  A review of THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, by Rosaline Orme Masso
n, New York, 1924; and AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF R.L.S., by Lloyd Osbourne; New York, 1924

  Dead thirty years, Robert Louis Stevenson still occupies a sort of receiving vault in the Valhalla of literary artists. The wake, meanwhile, goes on. No corpse, indeed, was ever surrounded by more enthusiastic mourners. There are far more Stevenson clubs than there are Whitman clubs, and no publishing season ever passes without making its contribution to Stevensoniana. But what is the net issue and sediment from all the uproar? Was Louis actually one of the first flight of English writers, a stylist in the grand manner? Or was he simply a clever fellow, enchanting to the defectively literate, but destined, in the end, to go below the salt? My impression is that the second guess, in the present state of human knowledge, is somewhat nearer to the truth than the first. The typical Stevensonian is bookish but not a bookman—in brief, a sort of gaper over the fence of beautiful letters. It is with the clan as it is with the fanatical Dickensians, who are mainly persons who have never read Thackeray, and with the Johnsonians, who are largely Babbitts who have never read anything, not even Johnson. I do not, of course, overlook such magnificoes as Henley, Henry James and Edmund Gosse—but Henley was Stevenson’s friend, James was always amiable, and Gosse is in favor of everybody. I can detect no passion for Stevenson among the men and women who are actually making the literature of today. There are hot partisans among them for Joseph Conrad, for Hardy, for Meredith, for Flaubert, for Dostoievski and even for Dickens, but there are none, so far as I am aware, for good Louis. His customers, beginning with literary college professors, often female, fade into collectors of complete library sets. Himself always a boy of 17, he seems to hold best those readers whose delight in the wonders of the world is not too much contaminated by the cramps and questionings of maturity.

  The two biographical volumes above listed make no effort to fix his place; they are wholly devoid of critical purpose. Miss Masson simply puts together all she can find out about his life, adds a few dozen pictures, and calls it a book. The thing is thorough, and, despite some pedaling here and there, very useful; in particular, it does justice to Stevenson’s father, a strict Presbyterian but a gentleman. What miseries the old man must have suffered during Louis’s early efforts to lead his own life! How the news that came home from Paris must have lacerated his Calvinistic pruderies, and then the later news from California! Moreover, all these antinomian monkeyshines cost him a great deal of hard money, and the money of a Scotsman flows in his very veins, along with the red corpuscles and the white. Nevertheless, he took it all like a man, and if the impression prevails that he starved and oppressed a genius it is due far more to the sentimentality of the Stevensonians than to his own acts. He was actually fond, humane, long-suffering and excessively generous. Miss Masson, as I say, does him justice. In Mr. Osboume’s book there is only the scantest mention of him; he is simply an anonymous who gives Mrs. Stevenson a house and £500 on page 58 and slides gently from the scene on page 71. This Osbourne volume, otherwise, should be of immense interest to the Stevensonian. There are twelve short chapters, showing Louis at close range at various ages from 26 to 44. There is intimate knowledge of him in them, and fine feeling, and they are all capitally written. The pupil certainly does no discredit to the master. Stevenson himself seldom wrote anything better.

  What is wanting is a full-length study of him, done objectively and by a realistic and scientific hand. There are models, each going about half of the way, in Van Wyck Brooks’s autopsy of Mark Twain and Katharine Anthony’s of Margaret Fuller.* It is a wonder, indeed, that no Freudian has been tempted to the task, for Stevenson was surely one of the most beautiful masses of complexes ever encountered on this earth. His whole life was a series of flights from reality—first from Presbyterianism, then from the sordid mountebankery of the law, and then from the shackles of his own wrecked and tortured body. He fled in the spirit to the Paris of Charles VII as he fled in the flesh to the rustic Bohemia at Barbizon; later on he fled in both garbs to the South Seas. Doomed to spend half his life in bed, beset endlessly by pain, brought often to death’s door by hemorrhages, and sometimes forbidden for days on end to work or even to speak, he found release and consolation in gaudy visions of gallant encounters, sinister crimes and heroic loves. He was the plow-boy dreaming in the hay-loft, the flapper tossing on her finishing-school bed. It was at once a grotesque tragedy and a pathetic farce, but it wrung out of him the best that was in him. What man ever paid more bitterly for the inestimable privilege of work? Stevenson, alas, wrote a great deal of third-rate stuff; even his most doting admirers must find it hard to read, for example, some of his essays. But out of his agony came also “Lodgings for the Night,” “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door,” “Will o’ the Mill,” and “Treasure Island,” and if they do not belong absolutely in the first rank, then certainly they go high in the second. Every one of them represents an attempt to escape the world of reality by launching into a world of compensatory fancy. In each of them the invalid buckles on an imaginary sword and challenges a very real enemy.

  His weakness as an imaginative author lies in the fact that he never got beyond the simple revolt of boyhood—that his intellect never developed to match his imagination. The result is that an air of triviality hangs about all his work, and even at times, an air of trashiness. He is never very searching, never genuinely profound. More than any other man, perhaps, he was responsible for the revival of the romantic novel in the last years of the Nineteenth Century, and more than any other salient man of his time he was followed by shallow and shoddy disciples. These disciples, indeed, soon reduced his formula to absurdity. The appearance of Joseph Conrad, a year after his death, disposed of all his full-length romances save “Treasure Island,” and that survived only as a story for boys. Put beside such things as “An Outcast of the Islands” and “Lord Jim,” even the best of Stevenson began to appear superficial and obvious. It was diverting, and often it was highly artful, but it was hollow; there was nothing in it save the story. Once more Beethoven drove out Haydn. Or, perhaps more accurately, Wagner drove out Rossini. It is very difficult, after “Heart of Darkness,” to get through “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The essays have gone the same way. They have a certain external elegance, as of a well-turned-out frock or charmingly decorated room, but the ideas in them are seldom notable either for vigor or for originality. When Stevenson wrote them he was trying to set up shop as a young literary exquisite in London. The breed, unluckily, is not yet extinct; its elaborate nothings still bedizen the English monthlies and weeklies. Stevenson was cured of that folly by his infirmities. They sent him headlong beyond the sky-rim. It was there he came to fame.

  Stevenson Again

  From the American Mercury, Jan., 1925, pp. 125–27.

  A review of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY, by John A. Steuart; Boston, 1924

  In reviewing Miss Rosaline Masson’s book on Stevenson, I bemoaned the lack of a critical biography of him, separating the facts about his life and work from the romantic gurgling of his admirers. Mr. Steuart’s two large volumes make a gallant attempt in that direction. They depict the young Stevenson of the Edinburgh days very realistically: a grotesque young mountebank about town, dressed like a guy, boozing in the lowest pubs, and carrying on a long series of depressing love affairs with ladies of the town. One of them, a street-walker, he even proposed to marry. Whence came such aberrations in the son of the respectable Presbyterian? Mr. Steuart, with Scotch smugness and lack of humor, blames them all on a touch of French blood: on the Stevenson family tree, distaff side, there hung the glands of a certain Lizars, or Lisouris, who settled in Edinburgh about the year 1600. Perhaps the theory has something in it: for a pure Scot to become an artist, even a bad one, is surely rather unusual. But the long hair, the beer-bibbing and the wenching are sufficiently accounted for, it seems to me, in a simpler way. Louis came to adolescence in an era of rising doubt, with the name of Darwin on every Christian’s lips and Huxley in full eruption. He was, f
urthermore, an only son, and greatly spoiled by a doting mamma. What more natural than for him to rebel violently against the parental Calvinism, and what more natural than for his revolt to take the form of gaudy waist-coats, disreputable hats, low companions, bad beer and loose women? One sees the same thing going on every day among the sons of the evangelical clergy; it is, indeed, almost an axiom that the first-born of a Methodist pastor is bound to be a hard egg. Is the case of Nietzsche so soon forgotten? Stevenson, I believe, took to the vine-leaves simply because the Westminster Catechism, to his generation, had become suddenly intolerable. He became an artist almost as a sort of afterthought. His first impulse was merely to get away from the hard-boiled, cast-iron, anthropophagous Yahweh of the family home. It was not until he escaped to Paris that revolt turned into ambition, and he began to assault the magazines of the time with manuscripts. Greenwich Village is responsible for many transformations of precisely the same sort. The Baptist virgin from the Middle West arrives in Sheridan Square with no thought save to get rid of her flannel underwear and flood her recesses with Chianti. But in a few weeks she is making batiks, learning rhythmic dancing, writing a novel, or rehearsing for one of the plays of Harry Kemp.