Second Mencken Chrestomathy (43 page)

From the
Smart Set
, Oct., 1915, p. 152

M
ARK
T
WAIN
was a great artist, but his nationality hung around his neck like a millstone. So long as he confined himself to the sympathetic portrayal of American people and American scenes, laughing gently and caressing while he laughed—for example, in “Huckleberry Finn”—he produced work that will live long after the artificialities of the Boston Brahmins are forgotten. But the moment he came into conflict, as an American, with the ideas and ideals of other peoples, the moment he essayed to convert his humor into something sharp and destructive, that moment he became merely silly and the joke was on him. One plows through “The Innocents Abroad” and through parts of “A Tramp Abroad” with something akin to amazement. Is such coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as humor? Is it really the mark of a smart fellow to laugh at “Lohengrin”? Is Titian’s chromo of Moses in the bulrushes really the best picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Catholicism save petty grafting, monastic scandals, and the worship of the knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not one, disbelieving in it, still be profoundly moved by its dazzling history, the lingering monuments of its old power, the charm of its prodigal and melancholy beauty? In the presence of the unaccustomed, Mark Twain the artist was obliterated by Mark Twain the American: all he could see in it was strangeness, and all he could see in strangeness was hostility. There are chapters in “Huckleberry Finn” in which he stands side by side with Cervantes and Molière; there are chapters in “The Innocents Abroad” in which he is indistinguishable from Mutt and Jeff. Had he been born in
France (the country of his chief abomination) instead of in a Puritan village of the United States, he would have conquered the world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of the Puritan smugness, the Puritan distrust of ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself, entirely distinct from and beyond all mere morality.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 114–22.
First printed in part in the
Smart Set
, Feb., 1913, pp. 154–55, and in part in the New York
Evening Mail
, July 7, 1917

George Ade was one of the few genuinely original literary craftsmen in practice among us in his time. He came nearer to making sound and living literature, when he had full steam up, than any save a scant half-dozen of the contemporary novelists, and the whole body of his work, both in books and for the stage, was as thoroughly American, in cut and color, in tang and savor, in structure and point of view, as the work of Mark Twain. No single American novel of the first years of the century showed more sense of nationality, a keener feeling for national prejudice and peculiarity, a sharper and more pervasive Americanism than such Adean fables as “The Good Fairy of the Eighth Ward and the Dollar Excursion of the Steam-Fitters,” “The Mandolin Players and the Willing Performer,” and “The Adult Girl Who Got Busy Before They Could Ring the Bell on Her.” Here, under all the labored extravagance, there are brilliant flashlight pictures of the American people in the Roosevelt I era, and American ways of thinking, and the whole of American
Kultur.
Here the veritable Americano of the early 1900s stands forth, lacking not a waggery, a superstition, a snuffle or a wen.

Ade himself, for all his story-teller’s pretense of remoteness, was as absolutely American as any of his prairie-town traders and pushers, Shylocks and Dogberries, beaux and belles. He fairly reeked with the national Philistinism, the national respect for respectability, the national distrust of ideas. He was a marcher, one fancies,
in parades; he joined movements, and movements against movements; he knew no language save his own; he regarded Roosevelt I quite seriously and a Mozart or an Ibsen as a joke; one would not be surprised to hear that, until he went off to his fresh-water college, he slept in his underwear and read the
Epworth Herald.
But, like Dreiser, he was a peasant touched by the divine fire; somehow, a great instinctive artist got himself born out there in that lush Indiana countryside. He had the rare faculty of seeing accurately, even when the thing seen was directly under his nose, and he had the still rarer faculty of recording vividly, of making the thing seen move with life. One often doubts a character in a novel, even in a good novel, but who ever doubted Gus in “The Two Mandolin Players,” or Mae in “Sister Mae,” or, to pass from the fables, Payson in “Mr. Payson’s Satirical Christmas”? Here, with strokes so crude and obvious that they seem to be laid on with a broom, Ade achieved what O. Henry, with all his sideshow-barker smartness, always failed to achieve; he filled his bizarre tales with human beings. There was never any artfulness on the surface. The tale itself was never novel, or complex; it never surprised; often it was downright banal. But underneath there was an artfulness infinitely well wrought, and that was the artfulness of a story-teller who dredged his story out of his people, swiftly and skillfully, and did not squeeze his people into his story, laboriously and unconvincingly.

Needless to say, a moralist stood behind the comedian, for he was 100% American. He would teach; he even grew indignant. Roaring like a yokel at a burlesque show over such wild and light-hearted jocosities as “Paducah’s Favorite Comedians” and “Why ‘Gondola’ Was Put Away,” one turns with something of a start to such things as “Little Lutie,” “The Honest Money Maker,” and “The Corporation Director and the Mislaid Ambition.” Up to a certain point it is all laughter, but after that there is a flash of the knife, a show of teeth. Here a national limitation closed in upon the satirist. He could not quite separate the unaccustomed from the abominable; he was unable to avoid rattling his Philistine trappings a bit proudly; he must prove that he, too, was a right-thinking American, a solid citizen and a patriot, unshaken in his lofty rectitude by such poisons as aristocracy, adultery,
hors
d’oeuvres
and the sonata form. But in other directions this thorough-going nationalism helped him rather than hindered him. It enabled him, for one thing, to see into sentimentality, and to comprehend it and project it accurately. I know of no book which displays the mooniness of youth with more feeling and sympathy than “Artie,” save it be Frank Norris’s forgotten “Blix.” In such fields Ade achieved a success that is rare and indubitable. He made the thing charming and he made it plain.

But all these fables and other compositions of his are mere sketches, inconsiderable trifles, impromptus in bad English, easy to write and of no importance? Are they, indeed? Do not believe it for a moment. Back in 1905 or thereabout, when Ade was at the height of his celebrity as a newspaper Sganarelle, scores of hack comedians tried to imitate him—and all failed. I myself was of the number. I operated a so-called funny column in a daily newspaper, and like my colleagues near and far, I essayed to manufacture fables in slang. What miserable botches they were! How easy it was to imitate Ade’s manner—and how impossible to imitate his matter. No; please don’t get the notion that it is a simple thing to write such a fable as that of “The All-Night Seance and the Limit That Ceased to Be,” or that of “The Preacher Who Flew His Kite, But Not Because He Wished to Do So,” or that of “The Roystering Blades.” Far from it, indeed. On the contrary, the only way you will ever accomplish the feat will be by first getting Ade’s firm grasp upon American character, and his ability to think out a straightforward, simple, amusing story, and his alert feeling for contrast and climax, and his extraordinary talent for devising novel, vivid and unforgettable phrases. Those phrases of his sometimes wear the external vestments of a passing slang, but they are no more commonplace and vulgar at bottom than Gray’s “mute, inglorious Milton” or the “somewheres East of Suez” of Kipling. They reduce an idea to a few pregnant syllables. They give the attention a fillip and light up a whole scene in a flash. They are the running evidences of an eye that saw clearly and of a mind that thought shrewdly. They give distinction to the work of a man who so well concealed a highly complex and efficient artistry that few ever noticed it.

In part from the New York
Evening Mail
, July 3, 1918, and in part from the New York
American
, Dec. 20, 1935

His name is alone sufficient to separate him sharply from the latter-day Southerner: to be a Cabell in Virginia is almost equivalent to being a Cecil in England. And in the whole bent of his mind there are belated evidences of that aristocratic tradition which came to its doom at Appomattox. He is remote, unperturbed, skeptical, leisurely, a man sensitive to elusive and delicate values. The thing that interests him is the inutile thing. He likes to toy with ideas, and is impatient of purposes. Reacting against the sordid and ignoble culture surrounding him, he seeks escape in bold and often extravagant projections of the fancy. In brief, a true artist, a civilized man—set down among oafish hawkers and peasants like a lone cocktail at a banquet of chautauqua orators.

What one finds, above all, in such books as “The Cream of the Jest,” “The Eagle’s Shadow,” and “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck” is style—a painter’s feeling for form and color, a musician’s feeling for rhythm. The thing said, though it is often excellent, is of secondary consideration: of chief importance is the way of saying it. And that way does not stop at the mere choice of words; it extends to the sentence as a whole, to the chapter as a whole: there is an adept search for the right measure, the right cadence. Reading Cabell, one gets a sense of a flow of harmonious sound. The inner ear responds to a movement that is subtly correct and satisfying. Such writing, of course, is very rare in America. When our novelists and essayists attempt it, the best they commonly achieve is a sort of idiotic sing-song—the sonorous gurgling of an evangelist exhorting sinners. But in Cabell’s prose the trick is somehow managed. In Cabell there is vastly more than juicy three-four time, as there was vastly more in Synge, Wilde and Pater.

What lies under the style—and often the style is so charming that one doesn’t look much beyond it—is the quality of irony, the somewhat disdainful detachment of a man who is beyond taking
his fable seriously, but not beyond sensing every atom of its comedy. This quality, in our American writing, is almost as rare as sound prose. Our typical novelist is quite incapable of it. He not only believes that his tale is important; he also commonly believes that some great piece of moral philosophy (or theology) lies imbedded in it—that there is a message there for suffering humanity capable of curing our metaphysical chilblains if we will only heed it.

The peculiar charm of Cabell’s romances of Poictesme does not lie in the fact that his heroes practise magic and slaughter dragons, for such things have been going on in fairy tales since time immemorial; it lies in the fact that they carry on their fantastic operations in the manner of honest American Rotarians, stopping anon to take lunch, to scratch themselves, and to slang their wives. It is, of course, not easy to manage the dichotomy. A bad author would make either the magic incredible or the heroes unreal. But Cabell, having great skill at such tricks, keeps both balls in the air very neatly, and the result, say in “The High Place,” is an extremely amusing book, full of both gaudy nonsense and penetrating observation. One recognizes the people as real, and, having so recognized them, one is ready to follow them through wholly fabulous adventures.

In Cabell’s so-called realistic stories—for example, “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck”—the thing runs the other way. The people here are undoubtedly as real as the cop on the corner, but nevertheless they are deftly hoisted above the commonplace, and made to perform in a very romantic way. They do things that are plausibly natural, and yet very far from the usual; their thoughts are yours and mine, and yet they reach bizarre conclusions. In brief, they are real people treated romantically, just as the dragon-chasers of Poictesme are romantics treated realistically. The effect in both cases is much the same. One enjoys the solid pleasure of recognition, and yet one is taken on an exhilarating flight through empyrean.

From the
Smart Set
, Jan., 1920, 138–40.
A review of J
URGEN
, by James Branch Cabell; New York, 1919

“Jurgen,” estimated by current American standards, whether of the boobery or of the super-boobery, is everything that is abhorrent. On the negative side, it lacks all Inspiration, all Optimism, all tendency to whoop up the Finer Things; it moves toward no shining Goal; it even neglects to denounce Pessimism, Marital Infidelity, Bolshevism, the Alien Menace and German
Kultur.
And on the positive side it piles up sins unspeakable: it is full of racy and mirthful ideas, it is brilliantly written, it is novel and daring, it is ribald, it is heretical, it is blasphemous, it is Rabelaisian. Such a book simply refuses to fit into the decorous mid-Victorian pattern of American letters. It belongs to some outlandish literature, most probably the French. One might imagine it written by a member of the French Academy, say Anatole France. But could one imagine it written by a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, say Bliss Perry? The thought is not only fantastic; it is almost obscene.