H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/May 26, 1910

Sam Walter Foss, librarian of the Somerville (Mass.) Public Library and a poet of parts, arises to sing the melancholy death song of the so-called American classics. Twenty years ago no refined American home was complete without the “works” of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Bayard Taylor and N. P. Willis. They were rammed into the heads of unwilling schoolboys in all the select academies of our fair republic; they were in great demand as presents; they were read religiously on the long winter evenings, as if the reading of them were some elevating and patriotic rite. It was sacrilege to scoff at them; even the compositions of Byron, Scott and Dickens were not held in greater veneration.

But no more! Today only the schoolboy remains faithful to those ancient idols, and in his case fidelity is the son of fear. Treason to Lowell brings the rattan from its sheath and a revolt against “Thanatopsis” is followed by a painful dusting of the pantaloons. For the same reason the schoolboy sweats through the ghastly stanzas of Spenser, the interminable bombast of Marlowe of “the mighty line,” the long reaches of “Paradise Lost,” the fustian of “Cymbeline,” the maudlin strophes of Donne. It is abominable, but it is held to be, in some vague way, nourishing to the mind. Such, at least, seems to be the theory of Messieurs the pedagogues. The course in “literature” at every respectable high school is still devoted, in the main, to Old Masters whose utterances, when laboriously interpreted, turn out to be not worth hearing. “Hudibras,” though long since unintelligible, is still set before the harassed jejune as a delectable intellectual victual. The pale wheezes of Irving are still labeled “humor,” and poor youngsters are ordered to laugh at them on penalty of the bastinado.

The Day of Deliverance

Naturally enough the average schoolboy when he leaves school knows very little about English literature and nothing at all about any other literature. He knows that Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564; that Hawthorne was the greatest of American novelists; that so many feet of such and such a breed make a line of such and such a species; that Poe was an astute psychologist and Emerson a profound philosopher, and a lot of other things that are either untrue or not worth knowing, but the chief impression left upon his mind is one of confusion and discomfort. He has been convinced, in brief, by bitter experience that the field of letters is a bleak and barren expanse, with no vegetation save coarse foot-ensnaring grasses and unpalatable medicinal weeds. 

Happy that boy if fortune leads him back as an independent explorer, where once he plodded the weary miles in chains! If he has the love of books in him he will go back. Bit by bit his mind will be cleared of its useless lumber. He will forget “Comus” and “Cato,” “Tamerlane” and “Irene,” with their dreary reaches and maddening footnotes, and discover for himself the delights of “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Old Bachelor,” “The Recruiting Officer” and “The Magistrate.” He will forget Dryden’s wire-pulling and his tedious blank verse and browse happily through the “Essay on Dramatic Poesie;” he will put Holmes and Cooper out of mind and find unction for his soul in the “Barrack Room Ballads” and the doings of the Great Gargantua, in Thackeray, Stevenson, Huxley, Zola, Meredith and Mark Twain.

Irving A Fallen Idol

As Mr. Foss points out, some of the towering giants of the schoolroom have long since shrunk to pitiful pigmies outside. There is Irving, for example. The printing of his books, for actual reading, has practically ceased. A few sets are still ground out every year from old plates and for the cut-rate trade, but no educated reader would think of making room for them on his shelves. But the publishers of schoolbooks notice no decline in the demand for annotated, classroom editions. Irving, in brief, is still forced through the skulls of the young. The poor schoolboy must assimilate his gentle humor but vacuous periods; it is assumed as a pedagogic axiom that no American who does not know him can be civilized or a patriot. 

Lowell is another fallen god whose worship is still kept up at academic altars. Bayard Taylor and Whittier are yet others. If you want the poems of Taylor today you must go to a second-hand store—or buy a school book. And if you want Willis you must go the same. As for Emerson, he has been declining steadily for a dozen years. The disciples of the New Thought, psychotherapy and other such flapdoodle still find stimulation in his speculations, but the more catholic reader has found the way to the German philosophies from whom he derived—and to those later Germans who have succeeded them.

The Case of Poe

Mr. Foss seems to be in some doubt about Poe. Is he growing or shrinking? It is probably near the truth to say that, all things considered, he is standing still. On the one hand, the old extravagant worship of him is dying out, and on the other hand, serious students of letters are beginning to admit his originality and influence. For a long time a certain flavor of romantic, inviting devilishness clung to Poe. His own actorial affectations and the libels of Griswold combined to invest him with an air of desperate immorality. But now we know that he was a quite decent and commonplace fellow, whose only vices were drunkenness and bathos.

At the moment, Poe is better regarded in France than at home, and the cause is not far to seek. There is something in the American character which revolts against the melodramatic pessimism of “The Raven,” and something, again, which scoffs at the sophomoric horrors of the prose tales. We are just a bit too healthy, just a bit too sane, to get any pleasure out of snouting through charnel houses. It is difficult to interest us in dank, mysterious forests, ruined castles and bleaching skulls. We prefer the open Mississippi, with Huck and Jim on the raft, and the clear, blue sky overhead. We have sound stomachs, and so we are optimists.

The Frenchman is of different kidney. He goes in for the more staggering, electric emotions. It is his aim, when he seizes his pen in hand, to shock the public, and if, perchance, that effort fails, he is content to shock himself. Hence the graveyard strophes of the so-called decadents. In most of them there is no poetry at all, but only thrills; just as in many of the tales of Poe there is no reality at all, but only horror. Read in cold blood, not a few of those tales must needs provoke the sacrilegious snicker—but no Frenchman ever reads them in cold blood.

The Madness of Youth

This is not saying, of course, that Poe is not read with pleasure in the United States. Far from it! He is still a very lively classic. His books are still sold. But the majority of his readers, I suspect, are youngsters. He was always a youngster himself—a sort of solemn, self-conscious Peter Pan. He never outgrew the Byronic, play-acting period. He always saw robbers behind the nearest hedge; he was always enchanted by the magic of sounding but empty words; he constantly played a part. It pleased him to think that he was the victim of dark and felonious conspiracies; to pose as a Hamlet; to lament lost loves that he never had; to stand aghast before his own devilishness. The same madness falls upon all of us when we are young. We all cultivate pessimism, and we all read Poe.

But wasn’t Poe, after all, a great poet? Well, maybe he was—ever and anon. But if “The Bells” is great poetry, then “The Battle of Prague” is music.