Second Mencken Chrestomathy (48 page)

In this protest and demand, of course, there is nothing but the babbling of men who mistake their feelings for thoughts. The truth is that criticism, if it were confined to the proposing of alternative schemes, would quickly cease to have any force or utility at all, for in the overwhelming majority of instances no alternative scheme of any intelligibility is imaginable, and the whole object of the critical process is to demonstrate it. The poet, if the victim is a poet, is simply one as bare of gifts as a herring is of fur: no conceivable suggestion will ever make him write actual poetry. And the plan of reform, in politics, sociology or what not, is simply beyond the pale of reason; no change in it or improvement of it will
ever make it achieve the impossible. Here, precisely, is what is the matter with most of the notions that go floating about the country, particularly in the field of governmental reform. The trouble with them is not only that they won’t and don’t work; the trouble with them, more importantly, is that the thing they propose to accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events most probably, beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are ostensibly designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble. To tackle them with a proof of that insolubility, or even with a colorable argument of it, is sound criticism; to tackle them with another solution that is quite as bad, or even worse, is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an automobile.

Unluckily, it is difficult for the American mind to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. The number of persons so afflicted is far greater than the records of the Patent Office show, for beyond the circle of frankly insane enterprise there lie circles of more and more plausible enterprise, and finally we come to a circle which embraces the great majority of human beings. These are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world, the believers in men, ideas and things. It is the settled habit of such folk to give ear to whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to pass. A caressing confidence—but one, unfortunately, that is not borne out by human experience. The fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization today than they were in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near tomorrow. Plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the beginning; plans for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation today; and yet they continue to hold off and elude us, and the chances are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us until the angels get tired of the show, and the whole earth is set off like a gigantic bomb, or drowned, like a sick cat, between two buckets.

Turn, for example, to the sex problem. There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot, who doesn’t know precisely how it ought to be dealt with. There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get her revenge on
man, who hasn’t a sovereign remedy for it. There is not a shyster of a district attorney, ambitious for higher office, who doesn’t offer to dispose of it in a few weeks, given only enough help from the city editors. And yet, by the same token, there is not a man who has honestly studied it and pondered it, bringing sound information to the business, and understanding of its inner difficulties and a clean and analytical mind, who doesn’t believe and hasn’t stated publicly that it is intrinsically and eternally insoluble. For example, Havelock Ellis. His remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He admits that the disease is bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and the certainty of death. Man is inherently vile—but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness. No prostitute was ever so costly to a community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader, or as the dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who jumps at such swine pipe.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Nov. 18, 1929

In all ages there arise protests from tender men against the bitterness of criticism, especially social criticism. They are the same men who, when they come down with malaria, patronize a doctor who prescribes, not quinine, but marshmallows.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 9–31. In a somewhat shorter form this essay first appeared in the New York
Evening Mail
, July 1, 1919. For a later, less romantic view of the critical process, see
A Mencken Chrestomathy
; New York, 1949, pp. 432–33

Every now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to
a somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects of their own craft. That is to say, they turn to criticising criticism. What is it in plain words? What is its aim, exactly stated in legal terms? How far can it go? What good can it do? What is its normal effect upon the artist and the work of art?

The answers made by the brethren are quite as divergent as their views of the arts they deal with. One group argues, partly by direct statement and partly by attacking all other groups, that the one defensible purpose of the critic is to encourage the virtuous and oppose the sinful—in brief, to police the fine arts and so hold them in tune with the moral order of the world. Another group, repudiating this constabulary function, argues hotly that the arts have nothing to do with morality whatsoever—that their concern is solely with pure beauty. A third holds that the chief aspect of a work of art, particularly in the field of literature, is its aspect as psychological document—that if it doesn’t help men to know themselves it is nothing. A fourth reduces the thing to an exact science, and sets up standards that resemble algebraic formulae—this is the group of the counters of strong and weak endings, the sleuths of sly stealings, the anatomists of tropes. And so, in order, follow groups five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, each with its theory and its proofs.

Anon some extraordinary member of the faculty revolts against all this dogma, and nails it, so to speak, to his barn-door. This was the case, for example, with Dr. J. E. Spingarn, who made an uproar a generation ago with a revolutionary and contumacious tract, by title “Creative Criticism.”
^*
An example of his doctrine: “To say that poetry is moral or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an equilateral triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle immoral.” Worse: “It is only conceivable in a world in which dinner-table conversation runs after this fashion: ‘This cauliflower would be good if it had only been prepared in accordance with international law.’ ” It is easy to imagine the perturbation of the current stars of
academic criticism when they encountered such heresies, for example, Prof. Dr. W. C. Brownell, the Amherst Aristotle, with his eloquent pleas for standards as iron-clad (and withal as preposterous) as those of the Westminster Confession;
^†
Prof. Dr. William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, with his discovery that Joseph Conrad preached “the axiom of the moral law,”
^‡
and Prof. Dr. Stuart Pratt Sherman, the Iowa patriot-critic, with his maxim that Puritanism is the official philosophy of America, and that all who dispute it are enemy aliens and should be deported.
^§
Dr. Spingarn here performed a treason most horrible upon the reverend order he adorned, and having achieved it, he straightway performed another and then another. That is to say, he tackled all the antagonistic groups of orthodox critics seriatim, and knocked them about unanimously—first the aforesaid agents of the sweet and pious; then the advocates of unities, meters, all rigid formulae; then the experts in imaginary psychology; then the historical comparers, pigeon-holers and makers of categories; finally, the professors of pure aesthetic. One and all, they took their places upon his operating table, and one and all they were stripped and anatomized.

But what was the anarchistic ex-professor’s own theory?—for a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas. In brief, what he offered was a doctrine borrowed from the Italian, Benedetto Croce, and by Croce filched from Goethe—a doctrine anything but new in the world, even in Goethe’s time, but nevertheless
long buried in forgetfulness—to wit, the doctrine that it is the critic’s first and only duty, as Carlyle once put it, to find out “what the poet’s aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his eye, and how far, with such materials as were afforded him, he has fulfilled it.” What is this generalized poet trying to do? asked Spingarn, and how has he done it? That, and no more, is the critic’s quest. The morality of the work does not concern him. It is not his business to determine whether it heeds Aristotle or flouts Aristotle. He passes no judgment on its rhyme scheme, its length and breadth, its politics, its patriotism, its piety, its psychological exactness, its good taste. He may note these things, but he may not protest them—he may not complain if the thing criticised fails to fit into a pigeon-hole. Every sonnet, every drama, every novel is
sui generis
; it must stand on its own bottom; it must be judged by its own inherent intentions. “Poets,” said Spingarn, “do not really write epics, pastorals, lyrics, however much they may be deceived by these false abstractions; they express
themselves, and this expression is their only form.
There are not, therefore, only three or ten or a hundred literary kinds; there are as many kinds as there are individual poets.” Nor is there any valid appeal
ad hominem.
The character and background of the poet are beside the mark; the poem itself is the thing. Oscar Wilde, weak and swine-like, yet wrote beautiful prose. To reject that prose on the ground that Wilde had Byzantine habits is as absurd as to reject “What Is Man?” on the ground that its theology was beyond the intelligence of the editor of the
War-Cry.

This Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe theory, of course, throws a heavy burden upon the critic. It presupposes that he is a civilized and tolerant man, hospitable to all intelligible ideas and capable of reading them as he runs. This is a demand that at once rules out nine-tenths of the grown-up sophomores who commonly carry on the business of criticism in America. Their trouble is simply that they lack the intellectual resilience necessary for taking in ideas of any force and originality, and particularly new ideas. The only way they can ingest one is by transforming it into some one or another of current clichés—usually a harsh and devastating operation. They can get down what has been degraded to the mob level, and so brought into forms that they know and comprehend—
but they exhibit alarm immediately they come into the presence of the extraordinary. Here we have an explanation of Brownell’s loud appeal for a tightening of standards—
i.e.
, a larger respect for precedents, patterns, rubber-stamps—and here we have an explanation of Phelps’s inability to comprehend the colossal phenomenon of Dreiser, and of Boynton’s childish nonsense about realism, and of Sherman’s efforts to apply the Espionage Act to the arts, and of Paul Elmer More’s
^‖
querulous enmity to romanticism, and of all the fatuous pigeon-holing that passes for criticism in the more solemn literary periodicals.

As practised by such learned and diligent but essentially ignorant and unimaginative men, criticism is little more than a branch of homiletics. They judge a work of art, not by its clarity and sincerity, not by the force and charm of its ideas, not by the professional virtuosity of the artist, not by his originality and artistic courage, but simply and solely by what they conceive to be his correctness. If he devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes, political, economic and aesthetic, in a sonorous manner, then he is worthy of respect. But if he lets fall the slightest hint that he is in doubt about any of them, or worse still, that he is indifferent to them, then he is a scoundrel, and hence, by their theory, a bad artist.

Against such idiotic notions American criticism makes but feeble headway. We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease, Even the vicious are still in favor of crying vice down. “Here is a novel,” says the artist. “Why didn’t you write a tract?” roars the critic—and down the chute go novel and novelist. “This girl is pretty,” says the painter. “But she has left off her brassière,” comes the protest—and off goes the poor dauber’s head. Genuine criticism is as impossible to such inordinately narrow and cocksure
men as music is to a man who is tone-deaf. The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion; as Spingarn says, “aesthetic judgment and artistic creation are instinct with the same vital life.” This is why most of the best criticism of modern times has been written by men who have had within them, not only the reflective and analytical faculty of critics, but also the gusto of artists—Goethe, Carlyle, Lessing, Schlegel, Sainte-Beuve, and, to drop a story or two, Hazlitt, Georg Brandes and James Huneker. Huneker, tackling “Also sprach Zarathustra,” revealed its content in illuminating flashes. But tackled by Paul Elmer More, it became no more than a dull students exercise, ill-naturedly corrected.…

Such is the theory of Spingarn—now, alas, an angel in Heaven. It demands that the critic be a man of intelligence, of toleration, of wide information, of genuine hospitality to ideas. Unfortunately, the learned brother had been a professor in his day, and, professor-like, he began to take in too much territory. Having laid and hatched, so to speak, his somewhat stale but still highly nourishing egg, he began to argue fatuously that the resultant flamingo was the whole mustering of the critical
Aves.
The fact is, of course, that criticism, as humanly practised, must needs fall a good deal short of this intuitive re-creation of beauty, and what is more, it must go a good deal further. For one thing, it must be interpretation in terms that are not only exact but are also comprehensible to the reader, else it will leave the original mystery as dark as before—and once interpretation comes in, paraphrase and transliteration come in. What is recondite must be made plainer; the transcendental, to some extent at least, must be done into common modes of thinking. Well, what are morality, hexameters, movements, historical principles, psychological maxims, the dramatic unities—what are all these save common modes of thinking, short cuts, rubber-stamps, words of one syllable? Moreover, beauty as we know it in this world is by no means the apparition
in vacuo
that Spingarn seemed to see. It has its social, its political, even its moral implications. The finale of Beethoven’s C Minor Symphony is not only colossal as music; it is also colossal as revolt; it says something against something. Yet more, the springs of beauty are not within itself alone, nor even in genius alone, but often in
things without. Brahms wrote his
Deutsches-Requiem
, not only because he was a great artist, but also because he was a good German. And in Nietzsche there are times when the divine afflatus takes a back seat, and the
spirochaetae
have the floor.