PREJUDICES.*
WE believe we are right in saying that a good many Americans are rather surprised at the almost respectful attitude with which Mr. Mencken's essays in criticism, Prejudices, has been received in this country. We believe that here is a case in which our politeness has biased our judgment. Mr. Mencken is not in any true sense a literary critic at all. He has an exhilarating taste in name-calling and the courage of his opinions, but that by no means constitutes a complete critic's baIterie de cuisine. Sociological satire is evidently a much happier field to Mr. Mencken. In the very first essay in his book, " Criticism of Criticism of Criticism," it seems for a moment as though he had the matter in him, but when we turn to his criticism of actual books and verse we find that he is not even the good showman ; there is not a spark of revelation in the book, and this we believe to be for the reason that he approves of nobody, for there is one thing for which the reader will look in vain in this book, and that is for praise and appreciation of some one. The nearest Mr. Mencken gets to laudation is to approve one man because he is clever at abusing dramatic authors and theatrical producers. However, the some- what sterile regions of his chapters are at least illuminated by brilliant phrases, though we feel that in a book of criticism they are only mirage lights. At least they beguile us of some of the fatigue of the journey. He is speaking of a Professor Spingarn, who has a peculiar theory of criticism : " But what is the anarchistic ex-professor's own theory —for a pro- fessor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas." Of Mr. Howells he says that, though he never praised the entirely bad, he was so busy offering praise to the merits of mediocrity that he had no time to discover the greater men of his age. " Busy in the sideshows, he didn't see the elephants go by."
Mr. Mencken is perhaps at his best in his strictures on the Later work of Mr. H. G. Wells. The Soul of a Bishop, he hazards, is " perhaps the worst novel over written by a serious novelist since novel-writing began."
" And then, to make an end, came ' Joan and Peter '—and the collapse of Wells was revealed at last in its true proportions. This Joan and Peter' I confess, lingers in my memory as
• Prehatices. By H. L. Mencken. London: Jonathan Cape. [7s. 6d. net.I =pleasantly as a summer cold, and so, in retrospect. I v perhaps exaggerate its intrinsic badness. I would not look into it again for gold and frankincense. I was at the job of reading it for days and days, endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent fatuity, its almost fabulous inconse- quentiality."
Mr. Mencken believes that Mr. Wells's trouble is that he has become dissatisfied with the work of an artist :- " It was not enough to display the life of his time with accuracy and understanding ; it was not even enough to criticize it with a penetrating humor and sagacity. From the depths of hi; being, like some foul miasma, there arose the old, fatuous yearning to change it, to improve it, to set it right where it wri; wrong, to make it over according to some pattern superior to the one followed by the Lord God Jehovah. With this sinister impulse, as aberrant in an artist as a taste for logs in archbishop, the instinct that had created Tono-Bungay ' and The New Machiavelli' gave battle, and for a while the issue was in doubt."
And so on, all quite amusing. He has much the same sort of treatment for Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw, he says, is not original. He only " drags skeletons from their closet and makes them dance obscenely ; but every one, of course, knew that they were there all the while." Nor, he holds, is Shaw an Agnostic :-
" but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cock- sure and bilious sort—in fact, almost the archetype of the blue- nose In the theory that he is Irish I take little stock. His very name is as Scotch as haggis, and the part of Ireland front which he springs is peopled almost exclusively by Scots."
These sallies would be delightful introductions to penetrating analyses which displayed to us, with all their freshness, the bright, sparkling charm of these two writers, but Mr. Mencken gives us nothing of the sort, and presently we get tired of watch- ing stones tied on the end of a string bouncing off the nose of this or the other of our literary Olympians. The thing is too impartial ; the fun is too obviously that of the hobbledehoy, not that of the well-wisher who knows how good it is for the great to be stung up now and then. Perhaps the explanation of Mr.
Mencken's attitude is to be found in his chapter on the American magazine, in which he tells us that the American public liken nothing so much as " violent and effective denunciation."
Previous page
