Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  Mr. Steuart shows how long it took Stevenson to learn his business—how, indeed, he never learned it at all until his last few years. His early work was all heavily imitative, and in some of it imitation went very close to plagiarism. Despite all the enthusiasm of his disciples, there is really very little that is sound and praiseworthy in his essays; most of them are ruined by transparent affectations. He wrote, in those days, as he dressed: like a popinjay. It was not until he came to “Treasure Island” that he acquired a style that was straightforward and clear—and “Treasure Island” was a deliberate imitation of the juvenile pot-boilers of a forgotten hack, one Alfred R. Phillips. Mr. Steuart recalls the curious fact that it was a complete failure when it was published serially in Young Folks, and hazards the opinion that it is not much read by boys, even today. I incline to agree with him. “Treasure Island,” I believe, is mainly read by grown men, and in the same mood that takes them to detective stories—that is, the mood of deliberate relaxation. Men of the best taste, of course, do not often seek relaxation in that way. Detective stories are read by United States Senators and bank presidents, but not often, I believe, by artists. Stevenson never qualifies for the first table; in his best work there is always a strong flavor of the second-rate. Perhaps Mr. Steuart is right in arguing that he ought to be admitted, not for the genius that he probably lacked, but for the diligence and courage with which he tried to make the best use of the moderate talents he began with. His long and gallant struggle against ill health is surely not to be sniffed at. Beneath that motley of the mountebank there was a very real hero.

  Mr. Steuart’s work gets further than any of its predecessors, but it still leaves much to be said. Its materials are thrown together loosely and they are not sufficiently documented; moreover, the author intrudes his own personality too often, and it is uninteresting. When he essays to be critical in the grand manner, he sometimes becomes only sophomoric. What is still needed is a book on Stevenson by a first-rate critic—one sufficiently interested in him to treat him humanely, and yet sufficiently critical to examine him scientifically. Like many another—for example, Bronson Alcott, Thoreau, Björnson and Tolstoi—he was far more engaging as a man than as an artist. His flight to the South Seas gave a grand and gaudy realization to the dreams of every youth who rebels against the dreadful dullness of human existence under Christianity—the stupidity of his parents, the imbecility of his pastors, the sordid business of getting a living. The rest fret themselves into resignation, and one finds them, in the end, playing golf, or haranguing Kiwanis, or writing plays for Broadway. But now and then a Stevenson or a Conrad actually takes ship, and then there is a new hero in the world, and a glow of second-hand joy.

  The Father of Them All

  From the American Mercury, Dec., 1928, pp. 506–07.

  A review of ZOLA AND HIS TIME, by Matthew Josephson; New York, 1928

  The eclipse of Zola is one of the strange phenomena of literary history. He is probably read less today than any other major novelist of his epoch, and in discussions of the current literary tides it is unusual to encounter any mention of his name. Yet it must be plain that, in certain important ways, he was the most influential novelist of the Nineteenth Century, not forgetting Scott, nor Balzac, nor Dickens, nor even Dostoievski, and that his mark is still distinctly visible upon all the considerable brethren of the craft. It was his function, deliberately assumed and triumphantly discharged, to relate his art to the new views of man and the world that came in with “The Origin of Species”—to pull it out of the cloister and bring it into the main stream of human thinking. He was at once a daring revolutionist and a brilliant and imaginative builder. Sweeping away at one colossal stroke the old subjective psychology that had sufficed novelists since the days of Job, he sought for the key to the external tragedy of man in the new science of biology. There the search goes on to this day. The modern novelist is only half an artist; the other half of him is a scientist—an incompetent one perhaps, but still a scientist.

  Zola’s own competence was surely not extraordinary: he was only too prone to accept the new scientific concepts of his time without critical examination, and even, indeed, without any examination whatever. Nevertheless, they took him in the right direction, for most of them, after all, were sound. Best of all, they implanted in him the habit of direct observation—they made him go for his material, not to his imagination, but to the facts. Such a novel as “La Terre” may have glaring defects as a work of art, but it is at least a tremendously accurate and moving human document. The people in it do not live as Hamlet and Ophelia live, in a pale mist of fancy; they live as a streptococcus lives, snared fast in a test-tube. It is no wonder that the book caused an uproar. We have, of late, heard the same uproar over “Elmer Gantry,” and for the same reason. What stood against Zola, in the days of his greatest achievement, was that the readers compared his people, not to the real human beings he had studied, but to the imaginary human beings of other novelists. His enemy was Balzac, and he knew it. He was not simply another novelist; he was a novelist of quite a new kind.

  His defect was that of all innovators and enthusiasts: he went so far with his formula that it became mechanical and inhuman. In his early works, even after he had taken the new line, there were sufficient concessions to the conventions of Nineteenth Century novel-writing to make them endurable, even to the sentimental customers of Daudet and company. But with “L’Assommoir” he abandoned the decorums of the boudoir for the harsh realism of the clinic, and by the time he came to “Germinal” and “La Terre” he was in the dissecting room. “Germinal” will probably survive as one of the great novels of all time, but the contemporary reviews of it were almost uniformly unfavorable and its huge contemporary sale was as pornography, not as work of art. People revolted from its appalling picture of human misery as they would from a meticulous report of a difficult labor or a true biography of Warren Gamaliel Harding. But it was true. And if the business of a novelist is to penetrate and reveal the agony of man in this world, it was a novel, and a great one.

  After “La Terre,” and especially after “La Débâcle,” Zola began to weaken and wobble. Success enfeebled him, as it enfeebles all artists, not to say all scientists. He became a rich man, with a country house, servants, public engagements, investments, a conscience. He took a drastic cure to reduce his weight, and had his beard neatly clipped. Yearning for offspring and finding himself with a sterile wife who refused to be put away, he achieved a son and a daughter in collaboration with an amiable female neighbor. There was talk of putting him into the French Academy, an honor, like all French honors, comparable to being elected to the Elks. He was headed for the puerile melodrama of the Dreyfus affair, in which the rôle he played, observed calmly in retrospect, seems to have been little distinguishable from that of a movie star recommending Lucky Strikes. “Le Docteur Pascal” showed a new and “good” Zola—an optimist, a right-thinker. There followed the cities series, “Lourdes,” “Rome” and “Paris.” “Fécondité” found him at the bottom of the slide. Its last four or five chapters contain some of the most maudlin drivel ever penned by mortal man.

  Zola had many defects as a man. He was vain, arrogant and intolerant. An Italian by ancestry, he naturally loved money, and there were times when his passion for it made a fool of him. He was an eager seeker for public notice, and maneuvered for it in a shameless manner. Afraid of his virago of a wife on the one hand, he grossly deceived and humiliated her on the other. His courage in the Dreyfus business has been greatly exaggerated in the telling, chiefly by English reporters eager to make propaganda against the French. He ran away at a critical moment, and frequently forgot Dreyfus in thinking of Zola. But he had many compensating virtues. He had a fine intelligence: he was eager for knowledge and able to grasp elusive facts. He was immensely diligent and took his trade seriously. The old-time novelist needed only pen, paper and a quiet room; Zola studied life at first hand, laboriously, conscientiously, thoroughly. Nothing that w
as human was uninteresting to him, and nothing that was human surprised or shocked him. His eye was made for the microscope; his hands were not cut out for the lute. For metaphysics he had a healthy contempt: what interested him was physiology. He had, in his best days, the vast impassivity of a Darwin, the true detachment of a born scientist. What men thought engaged only his passing attention; he devoted himself to observing what they did. He was, in a very real sense, the first behaviorist.

  The good novels of his prime are now neglected, I suspect, mainly because he wrote so many bad ones in the days of his decline. He passed out of life somewhat ridiculous: a scientist turned uplifter. The messianic delusion has ruined many men, but few better ones. By his own single effort he reoriented the novel, and made every successor his debtor. There are romancers left who show no trace of his influence, but surely not many novelists. His marks are all over such men as Wells, Bennett, Mann, Sudermann and Proust. He has been vastly more influential than either Flaubert or Turgeniev. The novel that Dickens wrote survives today only as a conscious archaism; it seems idiotic after “Germinal” and “La Terre.” Some day, I believe, these astounding works will be read again. Perhaps the tide is turning toward them already. For years they were obtainable in English only in mutilated versions, poorly printed. The Comstocks hunted them down relentlessly; in England their publisher, the elder Vizetelly, was thrown into jail, and died there. But now they begin to appear in better editions, with prefaces by various learned hands. Their day may be coming.

  Freudian Autopsy upon a Genius

  From the American Mercury, June, 1931, pp. 251–52.

  A review of THE POLISH HERITAGE OF JOSEPH CONRAD, By Gustaf Morf (Richard R. Smith); New York, 1931

  Years ago, in the course of a review of one of the late Joseph Conrad’s books, I permitted myself the observation that all of his characters, in the last analysis, were Poles. Sometimes he called them Germans, Frenchmen, Latin-Americans, Chinamen or Malays, and very often he called them Englishmen, but always they remained Poles like himself. This observation somewhat exercised Conrad, but his argument, when it reached me, convinced me only that a great artist is often a bad observer of his own psychological processes. This conviction is now heavily reënforced by Dr. Morf, for his book is devoted to proving, not only that practically all of the characters in the Conrad gallery are Poles, but also that the transactions in which they engage are largely echoes from Conrad’s own life, or the lives of his relatives. The whole canon of his works, in fact, is moved over from English literature to Polish literature, and the circumstance that they are written in English becomes a trivial accident, like the circumstance that Frederick the Great’s highly Prussian memoranda were written in French.

  Whether or not Dr. Morf is a Pole himself I don’t know, but he is quite at home in the Polish language, and so brings forward a great deal of material hitherto unknown to English critics. Part of it is to be found in the autobiography of Conrad’s uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski, part comes from the writings of Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, and part is in other family papers. Dr. Morf says that, both as boy and as man, Conrad was almost the archetypical Pole—full of grand projects, an incurable romantic, an ardent patriot, and, with it all, the victim of chronic repinings and despairs. He went to sea as a young man simply because he craved heroic adventure, and the Russians had the lid down so tightly in his part of Poland that there was no chance for it at home. Had the times been happier he would have taken to the field against the oppressor, as his forebears had done before him. But in the Poland of the early ’70s a Polish patriot was as hopelessly hobbled as a biologist in Mississippi, and so young Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski herbu Nalecz (thus Dr. Morf gives his name) had to content himself with dreams of the Congo and Cathay.

  In his career as a sailor there was something touchingly ludicrous, though he himself seems to have been unaware of it. He was as ill-fitted for the sordid routine of a British merchant skipper as he would have been for the life of a ballet dancer. He was apparently resented as a foreigner and distrusted as a romantic. He took his ship too near to dangerous coasts, and proposed voyages that were far more glamorous than profitable. Finally, as every one knows, he abandoned deep water for the infernal Congo river trade, and there came near losing his life. Dr. Morf hints that he went to Africa less as a steamboat commander than as a sort of explorer—that he always liked to identify himself, not with the dull, respectable and often pious brethren of his mundane vocation, but with the glittering, and sometimes wicked adventurers of the past—Torres, Tasman, Cook, and so on. In this identification he sought an escape from his bafflement as a Polish patriot. If he could not slit the gullets of damned Muscovites he would at least prove that he was still a devil of a fellow, and not to be daunted by cannibals and mosquitoes.

  Unfortunately, this escape mechanism, in the long run, failed to work. Conrad could never quite rid himself of his Polish conscience; he harbored to the end a disquieting feeling that he had deserted and betrayed Mother Polonia. Dr. Morf says that this feeling was responsible for “Lord Jim.” He sees the whole story of Jim as a sardonic and shuddering projection, thrown up as by some ghastly magic lantern, of Conrad’s own story. “It is,” he says, “more than a novel; it is a confession. As a confession of a man tortured by doubts and nightmarish fears it must be understood, if it is to be understood at all.” The central episode of the tale is almost too familiar to need recalling: Jim, a ship’s mate, violates all the canons of his craft by deserting his ship in the face of disaster, and thereafter wanders forlorn and disconsolate in an Eastern jungle, a pariah beyond rehabilitation. The sinking ship, says Morf, is Poland, and Conrad is Jim. And the earnest of his desertion is his naturalization as a British subject. So long as he hesitated at that—and he hesitated a long while—there was some chance that fate would take him back to Poland, and restore him to the glorious enterprises of his ancestors. But once he had sworn to revere and cherish Queen Victoria he was lost forever.

  I leave this theory to your prayerful consideration, but must add, in justice to Dr. Morf, that he supports it with a great deal of curious evidence. The parallel between Jim’s career and Conrad’s, indeed, is astonishingly close, and extends to many small details. They go to sea, for example, under the same circumstances, they suffer almost the same misadventures, and they are consoled by the same diversions. Both become known in their circles, not by their surnames, but by their given names. Both have noble titles. The name of Jim’s ship is Patna, and Polska is the Polish name of Poland. Finally, the ship, after Jim deserts it, is towed to port by a French gunboat—an echo, says Morf, of the ancient Polish hope that the French would one day rescue them. “Lord Jim” was first published in 1900, the year that also saw the appearance of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams.” Conrad, says Morf, knew the Freud book, but disliked it intensely, and Freud with it. In that dislike there was something akin to his aversion to Dostoievski. Both were “too crude, too explicit.” Like all of us, he “did not want to know the objective truth about his own work.”

  H. G. Wells

  From THE LATE MR. WELLS, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 22–35. Into this essay entered parts of reviews of Wells books that had appeared in the Smart Set between 1908 and 1919. In 1919 Wells still had The Outline of History (1920), The World of William Clissold (1926), The Science of Life (1929), The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and Experiment in Autobiography (1934) ahead of him, but his best work was done. The view of him that is set forth here was adopted by most of the more competent critics who attempted estimates of him after his death.

  The high day of Wells lasted, say, from 1908 to 1912. It began with “Tono-Bungay” and ended amid the final scenes of “Marriage,” as the well-made play of Scribe gave up the ghost in the last act of “A Doll’s House.” In “Marriage” were the first faint signs of something wrong. Invention succumbed to theories that somehow failed to hang together, and
the story, after vast heavings, incontinently went to pieces. One had begun with an acute and highly diverting study of monogamy in modern London; one found one’s self, toward the close, gaping over an unconvincing fable of marriage in the Stone Age. Coming directly after so vivid a personage as Remington in “The New Machiavelli,” Dr. Richard Godwin Trafford simply refused to go down. And his Marjorie, following his example, stuck in the gullet of the imagination. One ceased to believe in them when they set out for Labrador, and after that it was impossible to revive interest in them. The more they were explained and vivisected and drenched with theories, the more unreal they became.

  Into “The Passionate Friends” (1913) there crept the first downright dullness. By this time Wells’s readers had become familiar with his machinery and his materials—his elbowing suffragettes, his tea-swilling London uplifters, his smattering of quasi-science, his intellectualized adulteries, his Thackerayan asides, his text-book paragraphs, his journalistic raciness—and all these things had thus begun to lose the blush of their first charm. To help them out he now heaved in larger and larger doses of theory—often diverting enough, but in the long run a poor substitute for the proper ingredients of character, situation and human passion. Next came “The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman” (1914), an attempt to rewrite “A Doll’s House” (with a fourth act) in terms of ante-bellum 1914. The result was 500-odd pages of bosh, a flabby and tedious piece of work, Wells for the first time in the rôle of unmistakable bore. And then “Bealby” (1915), with its Palais Royal jocosity, its running in and out of doors, its humor of physical collision, its reminiscences of “A Trip to Chinatown” and “Peck’s Bad Boy.” And then “Boon” (1915), a heavy-witted satire, often incomprehensible, always incommoded by its disguise as a novel. And then “The Research Magnificent” (1915): a poor soup from the dry bones of Nietzsche. And then “Mr. Britling Sees It Through” (1916).…