H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/January 2, 1911

Angle Saxon Hay Scales

In the United States and England, as in no other country of the world, size is the thing that counts. The Englishman has been under that spell of mere bigness for a thousand years. He has yielded to it so far that he now estimates everything measurable, from a dish of victuals to a painting in oils, and from a political party to a library of books, by its quantity, its heft, its bulk. The cardinal doctrine of his political creed is the doctrine that of two parties of unequal numbers the larger is always right and the smaller always wrong. He prefers a ponderous chunk of meat, a whole haunch or shoulder, even a whole carcass, to the French filet or the Viennese schnitzel.

In art he likes huge historical pieces, heroic statues, heaven kissing obelisks. He breeds large horses, large dogs, large cattle, large hogs. Desiring sons at least seven feet in height, he selects a wife with shoulders like a wrestler’s and hips like an aurochs. The human beings he most reveres are millionaires, heavyweight pugilists, owners of whole countries, fat judges, brobdingnagian policeman, tenors with necks like steamship funnels, spellbinders whose bellowing can be heard across the Thames. He clung for years to the three-volume novel; he is still hanging on to the towering top hat, the blanket-sheet newspaper, the 10-course dinner. The raiment he affects is made of cloth as thick as a doormat. Dying, he prefers to yield up the ghost to some malady which involves swelling—dropsy, for example, or gout.

This dimensional obsession constantly conditions and obfuscates his judgment when he approaches the fine arts, and particularly when he approaches literature. He ranks “The Newcomes” above “Barry Lyndon,” not because it shows better craftsmanship, which it certainly does not, but because it contains many more words. He respects Trollope, Richardson and Sterne because their books were interminable; he under-estimates Sheridan, Congreve, Farquhar and Wycherley because they wrote little and to the point. Not until they had achieved long and depressing dramas in blank verse did he admit the greatness of Tennyson and Browning. Burns he speaks of apologetically as a rhymester scarcely to be reckoned a true poet. Kipling he damns with sneers; Poe he will not have; Herrick he ranks below Pope. His national master-singer, the pride of his heart and home, is John Milton—and Englishman to the core, for he wrote a poem so long that few of us have ever read it and so dull that, having read it once, not one of us ever reads it again.

I am not jesting. This worship of mere bulk, this assumption that works of art are to be measured with yard-sticks, is a very real thing, not only in England but also in the United States, where English standards of value, inherited with the common speech, still defy the more philosophical metric system in criticism as well as in the grocery business. Of all phrases known to critical slang “sustained flight” is the one most used by our reviewers. Let a new book of verse appear and at once it is dragged out. “These lyrics show a great deal of merit, but it remains to be seen whether the author is capable of a sustained flight.” “Mr. Cale Young Rice, proving his claims to consideration by the sustained flight of “Yolanda of Cyprus’,” etc. “The sustained flights of Henry Van Dyke, William Vaughn Moody and Richard Watson Gilder lift them above the petty makers of pretty trifles.” And so on ad nauseum.

Measuring With A Rule

Ye gods and little fishes! What hideous balderdash! What abominable piffle! Could anything be more absurd than this constant assumption that a poet is not a poet until he has dragged out his song to the length of a grand opera—that a long poem is, in some recondite way, more difficult to write and more respectable when written than a short poem—that a vapid ode or a preposterous drama in blank verse, by sheer virtue of its magnitude, is a greater work of art than a lilting and exquisite lyric?

To me a greater absurdity is unimaginable, and yet one finds some such doctrine at the back of practically all the current criticism of poetry. The dull dramatic flap-doodle of Rice is praised by Howells and his fair followers. The interminable and unreadable odes of Van Dyke are hailed as masterpieces. The homiletic outpourings of Moody are discussed with solemn ponderosity. And, by the same token, the fine songs of Robert Loveman, and, above all, the extremely beautiful sonnets, ballads and lieder of Lizette Woodworth Reese, that true singer, are passed over lightly, as things too trivial to be considered seriously—or they are ignored altogether.

I dare say that the so-called literary monthlies mention the work of Van Dyke a hundred times as often as they mention the work of Miss Reese, and yet it must be apparent to any person with the rudiments of good taste that there is more poetry in one of her sonnets than in the whole of Van Dyke’s published work, “sustained” and unsustained, ode, rhapsody and anthem, blank verse and rhyme.

I am not seeking to belittle Van Dyke; he has written excellent lyrics himself and he is not to blame for the cant and fustian of those who heap absurd praises upon the worst fruits of his fancy. Neither am I attempting to make impossible comparisons of unlike things. All I am endeavoring to show is that literary criticism in these fair United States is made ridiculous by unauthentic standards—that it tends to fall, in the main, into the hands of silly repeaters of empty phrases—that it often fails in its first and most important business, which is to seek out and celebrate that work which shows the greatest content of sincerity and beauty, which offers the most striking proofs of a genuine summons to song, which holds out the fairest promise of enriching for all time the literary heritage of the race.

A Native Of Baltimore

And so, with this necessary preliminary, I shall devote a few modest articles to Miss Reese’s poetry, pointing out some of its distinguishing features and considering the ideas underlying it. The author happens to be a Baltimorean, but it is as a poet, and not as a mere Baltimorean, that she bids for and commands our attention and respect.