Second Mencken Chrestomathy (46 page)

In brief, he wrecks an interesting story, otherwise competently told, by trying to convert it into a puerile tract. As I have said, there are moments when his zest as a historian overcomes him, and he blurts out the truth—for example, in the episode of the one-eyed man, pp. 244 and 245. But in the main he sticks to his highly dubious thesis, and the result is that a tale intrinsically very interesting is reduced to the level of revival sermon. Almost the same tale was told three or four years ago by H. L. Davis, in “Honey in the Horn.” The theme was the same, the people were
the same, and the scene was not far removed. But Mr. Davis produced a wise and poignant story, free from banality and genuinely a work of art, whereas Mr. Steinbeck has produced only a sugar-teat for the intellectually under-privileged.

Its incidental merits remain, and they are not to be sniffed at. I have heard some complaint against it on the ground that it is full of naughty words, and must needs shock the tender. If so, then let the tender read “Pollyanna” and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.” As for me, I believe that Mr. Steinbeck solves his problem here with great skill, and a sufficient show of good taste. The loutish yearning to outrage the ladies’ aid society which defaces so much of Hemingway is not in “The Grapes of Wrath.” The author is dealing with people who are low-down in speech as in all things, and he must indicate that elemental fact, but he goes no further than is necessary. His dialogue is by no means as stenographically perfect as that of James T. Farrell, but nevertheless it is well observed and reported.

The pity is that a book of so many merits should be spoiled by so transparently silly a point of view. The job of interpreting and accounting for the morons who now swarm in the United States, consuming its substance and menacing its future, is not going to be done by college dunderheads, disguised as “trained experts,” or by political mountebanks at Washington, or even by wizards writing in the reptile press; it is probably going to be done, if it is ever done at all, by novelists. It needs imagination as well as information; it calls for men who can distinguish clearly between what fools believe and what is really true; it demands a kind of wisdom that is not the common wisdom. Here Mr. Steinbeck fails miserably. He reduces an immense complex of hidden causes and baffling effects to a mere problem in kindergarten morals. He tries to account for the collapse of a culture—and even the simian society of Arkansas share-croppers was based on a kind of culture—by finding a villain miles away, and blaming him. This is the sort of blah one hears from many otherwise sane people in wartime; it is heard only from the excessively credulous in the days of presumable normalcy. It is the lollipop on which bogus Liberals, New Dealers, and members of the “I-am-not-a-Communist—but” Society feed.

What is needed is a full-length investigation of the share-cropper and his allied anthropoids by someone with a novelist’s sharp eye for the apparently inconsequential but enormously significant fact, and a scientific freedom from childish prepossessions and flimsy theories. This year of prosperity sent its benefits to even the back-waters of the country, and encouraged the wholesale proliferation of marginal people. The years of scarcity are shoving more and more of them over the line, and they emerge from their wallows bellowing for succor.

But can any conceivable succor really restore them to self-sustaining? I begin to doubt it seriously. Life becomes tighter and more exigent than it was in the Golden Age, and it will probably go on growing tighter and more exigent for years to come. To nurse it back into people who are clearly unfit for it is simply to encourage the multiplication of their botched and hopeless kind. That idiotic process is now under way in the United States, and on an appalling scale. The problem before the house is to find some way to reverse it. A solution will never be reached by a resort to puerile sophistries, and sentimentalities by the New Deal out of the Uplift, with music by Karl Marx.

From T
HE
U
LSTER
P
OLONIUS
, P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 181–90.
Partly reprinted from the
Smart Set
, Aug., 1916, pp. 138–40

A
GOOD HALF
of the humor of Mark Twain consisted of admitting shamelessly to vices and weaknesses that all of us have and few of us care to acknowledge. Practically the whole of the sagacity of George Bernard Shaw consisted of bellowing vociferously what every one knows. I think I am as well acquainted with his works, both hortatory and dramatic, as the next man. I wrote the first book ever devoted to a discussion of them, in any language or in any land,
^*
and I read them steadily and eagerly for long years. Yet, so far as I can recall, I never found an original idea in them—never a single statement of fact or opinion that was not anteriorly familiar, and almost commonplace. Put the thesis of any of his plays into a plain proposition, and I doubt that you could find a literate man in Christendom who had not heard it before, or who would seriously dispute it. The roots of each one of them are in platitude; the roots of
every
effective stage-play are in platitude; that a dramatist is inevitably a platitudinarian is itself a platitude double damned. But Shaw clung to the obvious even when he was not hampered by the suffocating conventions of the stage. His Fabian and other tracts were veritable compendiums of the undeniable; what was seriously stated in them was quite beyond logical dispute. They excited a great deal of ire, they brought down upon him a great deal of amusing abuse, but I have yet to hear of any
one actually controverting them. As well try to controvert the Copernican astronomy. They are as bullet-proof in essence as the multiplication table, and vastly more bullet-proof than the Ten Commandments or the Constitution of the United States.

Well, then, why did the old boy kick up such a pother? Why was he regarded as an arch-heretic almost comparable to Galileo, Nietzsche or Simon Magnus? For the simplest reasons. Because he practised with great zest and skill the fine art of exhibiting the manifest in unexpected and terrifying lights—because he was a master of the logical trick of so matching two apparently safe premises that they yield an incongruous and inconvenient conclusion—above all, because he was a fellow of the utmost charm and address, quick-witted, bold, limber-tongued, persuasive, humorous, iconoclastic, ingratiating—in brief, a Celt, and so the exact antithesis of the solemn Saxons who ordinarily instruct and exhort us.

Turn to his “Man and Superman,” perhaps the greatest of all his plays, and you will see the whole Shaw machine at work. What he starts out with is the self-evident fact, disputed by no one not idiotic, that a woman has vastly more to gain by marriage, under Christian monogamy, than a man. That fact is as old as monogamy itself; it was, I daresay, the admitted basis of the palace revolution which brought monogamy into the world. But now comes Shaw with an implication that the sentimentality of the world chooses to conceal—with a deduction plainly resident in the original proposition, but kept in safe silence there by a preposterous and hypocritical taboo—to wit, the deduction that women are well aware of the profit that marriage yields for them, and that they are thus much more eager to marry than men are, and ever alert to take the lead in the business. This second fact, to any man who has passed through the terrible years between twenty-five and forty, is as plain as the first, but by a sort of general consent it is not openly stated. Violate that general consent and you are guilty of
scandalum magnatum.
Shaw was simply one who was guilty of
scandalum magnatum
habitually, a professional criminal in that department. It was his life work to announce the obvious in terms of the scandalous.

What lies under the common horror of such blabbing is the
deepest and most widespread of human weaknesses, which is to say, intellectual cowardice, the craven appetite for mental ease and security, the fear of thinking things out. All men are afflicted by it more or less; not even the most courageous and frank of men likes to admit, in specific terms, that his wife is fat, or that she decoyed him to the altar by a transparent trick, or that their joint progeny resemble her brother or mother, and are thus trash. A few extraordinary heroes of logic and evidence may do such things occasionally, but only occasionally. The average man never does them at all. He is eternally in fear of what he knows in his heart; his whole life is made up of efforts to dodge it and conceal it; he is always running away from what passes for his intelligence and taking refuge in what pass for his higher feelings,
i.e.
, his stupidities, his delusions, his sentimentalities. Shaw devoted himself brutally to the art of hauling this recreant fellow up. He was one who, for purposes of sensation, often for the mere joy of outraging the tender-minded, resolutely and mercilessly thought things out—sometimes with the utmost ingenuity and humor, but often, it must be said, in the same muddled way that the average right-thinker would do it if he ever got up the courage. Remember this formula, and all of the fellow’s alleged originality becomes no more than a sort of bad-boy audacity, usually in bad taste. He dragged skeletons from their closet and made them dance obscenely—but every one, of course, knew that they were there all the while. He would have produced an excitement of exactly the same kind (though perhaps superior in intensity) if he had walked down the Strand bared to the waist, and so reminded the shocked Londoners of the unquestioned fact (though conventionally concealed and forgotten) that he was a mammal and had an umbilicus.

Turn to a typical play-and-preface of his hey-day, say “Androcles and the Lion.” Here the complete Shaw formula is exposed. On the one hand there is a mass of platitudes; on the other hand there is the air of a peep-show. On the one hand he rehearses facts so stale that even suburban clergymen have probably heard of them; on the other hand he states them so scandalously that the pious get all of the thrills out of the business that would accompany a view of the rector in liquor in the pulpit. Here, for example, are some of his contentions:

It is unnecessary to go on. Could any one imagine a more abject surrender to the undeniable? Would it be possible to reduce the exegesis of a century and a half to a more depressing series of platitudes? But his discussion of the inconsistencies between the Four Gospels is even worse; you will find all of its points set forth in any elemental treatise upon New Testament criticism. He actually dishes up, with a heavy air of profundity, the news that there is a glaring conflict between the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew i, 1–17, and the direct claim of divine paternity in Matthew i, 18. More, he breaks out with the astounding discovery that Jesus was a good Jew, and that Paul’s repudiation of circumcision (now a cardinal article of the so-called Christian faith) would have surprised Him and perhaps greatly shocked Him. The whole preface, running to 114 pages, is made up of just such shop-worn stuff. Searching it from end to end with eagle eye, I have failed to find a single fact or argument that was not as obvious as a wart.

Nevertheless, this preface makes bouncing reading—and therein lies the secret of the vogue of Shaw. He had a large and extremely uncommon capacity for provocative utterance; he knew how to get a touch of bellicosity into the most banal of doctrines; he was forever on tiptoe, forever challenging, forever
sforzando.
His matter might be from the public store, even from the public junk-shop, but his manner was always all his own. The tune was old, but the
words were new. Consider, for example, his discussion of the personality of Jesus. The idea is simple and obvious: Jesus was not a long-faced prophet of evil, like John the Baptist, nor was He an ascetic, or a mystic. But here is the Shaw way of saying it: “He was … what we call an artist and a Bohemian in His manner of life.” The fact remains unchanged, but in the statement of it there is a shock for those who have been confusing the sour donkey they hear of a Sunday with the tolerant, likable Man they profess to worship—and perhaps there is even a genial snicker in it for their betters. So with his treatment of the Atonement. His objections to it are time-worn, but suddenly he gets the effect of novelty by pointing out the quite manifest fact that acceptance of it is apt to make for weakness, that the man who rejects it is thrown back upon his own courage and circumspection, and is hence stimulated to augment them. The first argument—that Jesus was of free and easy habits—is so commonplace that I have heard it voiced by a bishop. The second suggests itself so naturally that I myself once employed it against a chance Christian encountered in a Pullman smoking-room. This Christian was at first shocked as he might have been by reading Shaw, but in half an hour he was confessing that he had long ago thought of the objection himself, and put it away as immoral. I well remember his fascinated interest as I showed him how my inability to accept the doctrine put a heavy burden of moral responsibility upon me, and forced me to be more watchful of my conduct than the elect of God, and so robbed me of many pleasant advantages in finance, the dialectic and amour.