Tag Archives: literature

Decaying Classics

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.

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Characters, Not Plot, Live

H.L. Mencken

The Morning Union/October 25, 1925

One of the caressing signs of the times in literary America is the decay of the O. Henry influence upon the short story. Ten or fifteen years ago it threatened to engulf the cornfed literati completely, as that of Kipling had engulfed them in the preceding generation. Every go-getting young fictioneer in the Republic tried to write like the gifted jailbird. And most of the pedagogues of the English faculty devoted themselves to harangues and monographs upon his art.

No more. I can’t recall encountering a story of the O. Henry type in any first-class American magazine for five years past, and all the professors are now baying other and grander stags. All, that is, save a forlorn few–and these survivors are professors, not of beautiful letters, but of the commercial short story. Their pupils, disdaining Century and Scribner’s, aim for the all-Action yellows, where the quick mazuma is.

In such fields the ghost of Henry continues to stalk, and all his old tricks display themselves: The snap ending, the elaborately artificial phrase, the sob in the laugh. But nowhere else.

It is, as I hint, a blessed reform. For O. Henry, in his day, threatened to reduce the American short story to a feeble compound of transparent fraudulences. His manner was easy to imitate. Any neophyte with a hand for words could approximate it after four trials. He got it himself from bad newspaper reporters; it was chiefly compounded of slang made grandiloquent. And his snap endings, after a little practice, turned out to be easy, too. One simply turned the bartender, at the climax, into a poet, or the poet into a burglar. Henry had his own story as a model. He rang 200 changes upon it, and his imitators rang 10,000 more.

II.

What kept him below the salt was his defective sense of character—his incapacity for making his people live. The same marionette served him for his whole stock company. His Latin American revolutionists, his cowboys and his bartenders all spoke the same language, and were Identical under their skins. The dramatis personae of one story might have been moved into any other story without material loss of reality. All of these folk were stuffed dummies, worked by palpable wires and spouting the same uniform and unnatural jargon.

Great fiction, it must be obvious, contains juicier stuff. What we think of, when we recall story of the first rank, is not the plot, nor the style, but the people. Who remembers the plot of “Vanity Fair”? Or its tricks of phrase? But who, having met her, ever forgets Sharp? Some of the greatest fiction on the shelves, indeed, is immensely defective in plot—for example, “Vanity Fair” itself. And more of it is undistinguished and even crude in style—for example, the whole canon of Balzac, and most of the work of Dickens. But Balzac and Dickens had something better than style, and that was the capacity to create such personages as Pere Goriot and Micawber. So their novels live.

The short story responds to the same test exactly. Kipling conquered the world, not with phrases and trick endings, but with characters. He had the phrases and trick endings, too, but it was Terence Mulaney who made him. When he abandoned Mulvaney for hollow pseudo-scientific ingenuity—that is, when he abandoned character for plot—he blew up with a bang. Some of his later stories show a bold and luxurious imaginativeness; they are Immensely more “original.” schoolmarm sense, than anything O. Henry ever wrote. But they are completely forgotten—and Mulvaney lives on.

What survives of Bret Harte today? Only Mr. Jack Hamlin and Col. Culpepper Starbottle. They remain as real as Dogberry, Falstaff, or Robinson Crusoe. Harte, achieving them, attained to a sort of immortality. The rest of his work is already forgotten.

III

The same test, I believe, may be applied to contemporary writers; it is, perhaps, the surest of all gages of that Intrinsic skill and dignity. O. Henry, judged by it, failed miserably; and so did many of the writers who got a great deal of notice in his time; for example, James Lane Allen. But it leaves Dreiser unscathed, for it will be a long while before Hurstwood passes into the shadows, and it is kind to Jack London, for if he could not create a veritable man, he could at least create a tremendous dog.

This capacity for imagining and projecting character is rare, even for writers otherwise skillful. The late Henry James lacked it, and so I incline to the fear that he will presently vanish into thin air, despite the pother about him now. It is a significant fact that, in the postmortem discussion of him, “Daisy Miller” seems to be getting more attention than any of the books of his later years. The explanation, I believe, lies in the plain fact that in Daisy he came nearest to creating a living character. In “What Maisie Knew” he made his second best attempt; after that all his people stiffened into marionettes. He wrote about them magnificently, but it was like writing about mathematical symbols.

What lifted Mark Twain above Howells? Simply his infinitely keener feeling for character. Mark could not write about a railway conductor or an after-dinner orator without making the fellow live. His gallery is immense and superb: Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, the nigger Jim, old Finn, the king and the duke, Aunt Polly, the Widow Douglas, Col. Grangerford—nine masterpieces in one book! What did Howells offer to match them? He offered a pleasant manner—and a series of vacuums, each tagged with a name and a habitat, but every one as cold and empty as a political issue of 1884.

IV.

Howells, judged by the standard set up by schoolmarms, male and female, was a vastly more accomplished writer than old Mark. He wrote far more refined English; he was more learned and urbane; he appealed to higher tastes. But he lacked, alas, the thing that was worth all those other things lumped together; he lacked the capacity to imagine genuine human beings. His people, to mouth a stale phrase, are never quite convincing. One does not believe in them. One does not feel with them. One does not remember them.

I suspect the schoolmarms of today are making much the same mistake about Sinclair Lewis they made about Mark Twain. It is easy to see he is a somewhat crude and blatant fellow—that such novelists as Mrs. Wharton, for example, are much more refined. His English sometimes fevers the grammarian. His humor is often low and buffoonish. He lacks all feeling for what young college professors call the more delicate values. Personally, like Mark before him, he is loud.

But despite all these handicaps, he has managed to do something that all the Mrs. Whartons, striving desperately, have failed to do: he has created a series of brilliantly vivid and plausible characters, Instantly recognizable and overwhelmingly real. Babbitt is certainly no mere pasteboard figure in a story book. He has all the savor and authenticity of Abraham Lincoln, John L. Sullivan, or Buffalo Bill; he belongs to the small company of perfect and unforgettable Americans. His character becomes symbolic; his name is almost a common noun.

Only three other American writers have ever projected an imaginary man with surpassing skill, and compelled such quick recognition of his reality. Mark Twain did it with Col. Mulberry Sellers. Finley Peter Dunne did it with Mr. Dooley. Montague Glass did it with Potash and Permutter. Mark Twain, dead, has at last forced himself into the literature books, but Dunne and Glass are still on probation. It took the professors 40 years to discover the difference between Whitman and Whittier, and most as long to penetrate to that between Mark and Howells. On some lingering tomorrow, I take it, Dunne, Glass and Lewis will be overwhelmed with sudden and startling kisses.

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