AMERICAN CRITICZSM.t
Tim second collection of Mr. Mencken's Prejudices does not deal with particular writers but, for the most part, with the environment of the American artist and its effect on him. The • (1) Euripides and Shaw. By Gilbert Norwood. London : Methuen. re. CKL1—(2) The Cockpit. By Israel Zangwill. London : Heinemann.
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t Prejudices : Second Series. By IL L. Meneken. London : Jonathan
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first third' of the book is entitled' " The National Letters," and it is a diagnosis of the alleged impotence of the United States to produce literature of the first order and of its comparative sterility even on the lower grades. Mr. Mencken presents a picture of the intellectual condition of that country which reads like an unedited voyage of the late Lemuel Gulliver. No craze, he avers, is too vulgar, no imposture too patent, no catch- word too banal to dupe his incredibly credulous fellow-citizens. They will swallow anything except good work, and have an extravagant appetite for mediocrity of exotic, of Zulu, Eskimo, or even English origin. It is amazing to read a statement of the President of the Authors' League of America wherein he repu- diates all tests of literary value except that of popularity, speaks aptly enough of word merchants, and refers to tho action of a story as John Henry Plot ; or the tests for dramatic critics which were proposed by the Vice-President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Hero are three of them. They are proposed " for gentlemen chiefly employed in reviewing such characteristic American productions as the Ziegfeld Follies, Up in Mabel's Room, 84e.” :—
1. Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens I 2. Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by moonlight ?
3. Have you walked with whispers into the hushed presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini
The pretentious aestheticism of the latter is certainly more repulsive than the frank commercialism of the former. Yet these instances are not the worst, though they are the worst we dare quote. The American nation stands accused of " negli- gence amounting to fraud." At least Mr. Mencken has proved it unduly omnivorous. Mr. Mencken suggests, insists rather, that the existence of such a condition is due to the absence of a " civilized aristocracy, secure in its position, animated by an intelligent curiosity, sceptical of all facile generalizations, superior to the sentimentality of the mob.. . ." He dismisses as inadequate the many American substitutes for culture. Culture, he would agree, is a mode of feeling to be acquired only through leisured generations. If the old aristocracy of Virginia had survived the Civil War, it would probably have formed the nucleus of such a cultured minority.
We have dwelt at some length on the environment of the American artist because we believe these conditions to be responsible at any rate for Mr. Mencken's defects,. if not for his virtues as well. He is writing, as he shows us, for a highly emotional people which has not yet co-ordinated a system of values by which the worth of a work of art may be estimated, so that the ability to shout, to sparkle, or to gesticulate, being more obviously remarkable, is esteemed above delicacy of per- ception, nicety of phrase, and the finely balanced discrimination of the true critic.
There is a sentence in which Mr. Menoken speaks of his " profound reverence for and fidelity to the truth sometimes almost amounting to fanaticism." It is this fanaticism which makes the reading of his book a little exhausting ; and the evident courage with which he promulgates unpopular opinions does not entirely compensate us for the absence of the more gracious qualities of prose, the subtler manifestations of thought. However, Mr. Mencken's popularity in his own country at least proves that the American public possesses the qualities of its defects. If it is omnivorous it will swallow unpleasant truths from its sons as well as effusions from Zulu and Eskimo and panegyrics from Mr. Zangwill.
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