Second Mencken Chrestomathy (37 page)

From P
REJUDICES
: T
HIRD
S
ERIES
, 1922, pp. 201–212.
First printed in the
Smart Set
, May, 1922, pp. 138–42.
With an addition from the same, April, 1921, p. 50

Much wind has been wasted upon a discussion of the differences between realistic novels and romantic novels. As a matter of fact, every authentic novel is realistic in its method, however fantastic may be its fable, and every realistic novel shows its sly touches of romance. Even the most gifted romantic holds himself in: his heroes may be seven feet in height, but no such fabulist has ever made them eight or ten. And even such a realist as Dreiser is full of discreet reservations: he tells us about the time his hero attempted a poor working girl, but he never tells us about the time he had cholera morbus, or picked up
pediculae
at a Baptist prayer-meeting, or found a Croton-bug in his soup. The one aim of the novel, at all times and everywhere, is to set forth, not what
might
be true about the human race, or what ought to be true, but what actually is true. This is obviously not the case with poetry. Poetry is the product of an effort to invent a world appreciably better than the one we live in; its essence is not the representation of the facts,
but the deliberate concealment and denial of the facts. As for the drama, it vacillates, and if it touches the novel on one side it also touches the epic on the other. But the novel itself is concerned with human nature as it is practically revealed and with human experience as men actually know it. If it departs from that representational plausibility ever so slightly, it becomes to that extent a bad novel; if it departs violently it ceases to be a novel at all.

That women are still the chief readers of novels is known to every book clerk. What is less often noted is that women themselves, as they have gradually become fully literate, have forced their way to the front as makers of the stuff they feed on, and that they show signs of ousting the men, soon or late, from the business. Save in the department of lyrical verse, which demands no organization of ideas but only fluency of feeling, they have nowhere else done serious work in literature. There is no epic poem of any solid value by a woman, dead or alive; and no drama, whether comedy or tragedy; and no work of metaphysical speculation; and no history; and no basic document in any other realm of thought. In criticism, whether of works of art or of the ideas underlying them, few women have ever got beyond the
Schwarmerei
of Madame de Staël’s “L’Allemagne.” In the essay, the most competent woman barely surpasses the average Fleet Street
causerie
hack or Harvard professor. But in the novel the ladies have stood on a level with even the most accomplished men since the day of Jane Austen, and not only in Anglo-Saxondom, but also everywhere else—save perhaps in Russia.

It is my contention that women thus succeed in the novel—and that they will succeed even more strikingly as they gradually throw off the inhibitions that have hitherto cobwebbed their minds—simply because they are better fitted for realistic representation than men—because they see the facts of life more sharply, and are less distracted by mooney dreams. Women seldom have the pathological faculty vaguely called imagination. One doesn’t often hear of them groaning over colossal bones in their sleep, as dogs do, or constructing heavenly hierarchies or political utopias, as men do. Their concern is always with things of more objective substance—roofs, meals, rent, clothes, the birth and upbringing of children. They are, I believe, generally happier than men, if only
because the demands they make of life are more moderate and less romantic. The chief pain that a man normally suffers in his progress through this vale is that of disillusionment; the chief pain that a woman suffers is that of parturition. There is enormous significance in the difference. The first is artificial and self-inflicted; the second is natural and unescapable.

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.

From E
SSAY IN
P
EDAGOGY
, P
REJUDICES
: F
IFTH
S
ERIES
, 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.

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.

From T
HE
N
ATIONAL
L
ETTERS
, P
REJUDICES
: S
ECOND
S
ERIES
, 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.

A hitherto unpublished note

I
T 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.

From the
American Mercury
, Nov., 1924, pp. 378–80.
A review of T
HE
L
IFE OF
R
OBERT
L
OUIS
S
TEVENSON
, by Rosaline Orme Masson, New York, 1924; and A
N
I
NTIMATE
P
ORTRAIT 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.