A CRITIC IN C MAJOR

I

To live in the age of O. Henry is to be aware sooner or later of the enfant terrible of its latest phase, the author of "Prejudices." Opinions of this phenomenon run as widely asunder as men ever drift. To some he is a diabolical boy with a bean-shooter, amazingly accurate of aim; to others he is Demogorgon straight from hell with Orcus and Ades whose name is Nathan; to still others he is a smart Aleck mouthing the argot of the tribe -shall not the editor of "The Smart Set" be smart? But there is a minority very respectable to whom he is a genuine critic, the voice of his era. A recent London "Athenæum" reviewer has him "rapidly becoming the most important critic in America." That the "literati of New York" and beyond are fearfully aware of this high-vocabularied new censor of art and morals, ducking nervously at his very shadow, is ludicrously evident. The New York "Literary Review," for instance, with a critic of distinction for editor, has mentioned him or alluded to him on its editorial pages more often than

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any other contemporary. Is Mencken the typical critic of the O. Henry age, the type of critic that journalism is evolving-the critic of the future?

The man is so recent an arrival that few can honestly say they have read him, save in fragments. My own experience, perhaps, has been typical. There was a time not so long ago when the name Mencken called up for me only certain smashing reviews, O. Henry-like in their general effect. I smiled over them as work keyed to "The Smart Set"-smart. But the man was not to be dismissed. I found myself one day with "Prefaces" in my hand, and opening by chance my eye fell on this: "Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum." I opened again: "O Doctor admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus! Needless to say the universities have not overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an honourary A. M. of Yale"-this concerning one Krehbiel. Who would lay down a book as piquant as that promised to be? I finished it with gusto, though its ram's-horn roared against every wall I had ever stood upon. I am of the Puritans for six generations, I am a Methodist, I am a college professor: imagine the massacre of this book in a future number of "The Smart Set"! At the end of a furious charge upon a woolly little lamb of a publication this reviewer once worked himself up to this thunderous climax:

the United States "is the Billy Sunday among the nations." I was inclined after "Prefaces" to say, "Yes, and H. L. Mencken is the Billy Sunday among her critics." He defends the negative thunderously; he can out-Billy Billy himself. His vocabulary is richer. Consider such tremendous pulpit-thrashings as these:

The American people, taking them by and large, are the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in christendom since the fall of the Eastern Empire.

In the presence of the Methodist clergy, it is difficult to avoid giving away to the weakness of indignation. What one observes is a horde of uneducated and inflammatory dunderheads, eager for power, intolerant of opposition and full of a childish vanity-a mob of holy clerks but little raised, in intelligence and dignity, above the forlorn half wits whose souls they chronically rack. In the whole United States there is scarcely one among them who stands forth as a man of sense and information. Illiterate in all save the elementals, untouched by the larger currents of thought, drunk with their power over dolts, crazed by their immunity to challenge by their betters, they carry over into the professional class of the country the spirit of the most stupid peasantry, and degrade religion to the estate of an idiotic phobia. There is not a village in America

in which some such preposterous jackass is not in irruption.

The man puzzled me. Was he not perhaps a phenomenon of the war period? I thought so once; his most destructive eruptions have been since 1914. A world conflict waged long without quarter drives every man to extremes of speech, very often to phobia. Here was a young man undoubtedly running amuck. He attacked indiscriminately, it seemed to me, like a typhoon in a jungle. He did nothing but destroy. After me the deluge! Every cherished ideal, every hero, every idol, every sweet delusion, our whole America, "a nation of thirdclass men"-he damned with a crackle of superlatives. Note the range and execution of his guns: This of Virginia, the mother of Southern States:

Her education has sunk to the Baptist seminary level; not a single contribution to human knowledge has come out of her colleges in twenty-five years; she spends less than half upon her common schools, per capita, than any northern state spends. In brief, an intellectual Gobi or Lapland. Urbanity, politesse, chivalry? Go to! It was in Virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband whisky in women's underwear.

This of Roosevelt, and written in the period of laudation just following his death;

A glorified longshoreman engaged eternally in cleaning out bar-rooms-and not too proud to gouge when the inspiration came to him, or to bite in the clinches, or to oppose the relatively fragile brass knuckles of the code with chair-legs, bung-starters, cuspidors, demijohns, and ice-picks.

Are you a Puritan? Read this:

The Puritan, for all his pretensions, is the worst of materialists. Passed though his sordid and unimaginative mind, even the stupendous romance of sex is reduced to a disgusting transaction in physiology. As artist he is thus hopeless; as well expect an auctioneer to qualify for the Sistine Chapel choir. All he ever achieves, taking pen or brush in hand, is a feeble burlesque of his betters, all of whom, by his hog's theology, are doomed to hell.

And did you ever review a book, or enjoy a book review? Behold yourself:

Consider the solemn ponderosities of the pious old maids, male and female, who write book reviews for the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pretension to culture, a campus cocksureness, a laborious righteousness-but of sound æsthetic understanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas, not a trace. The normal American book reviewer, indeed, is an elderly virgin, a superstitious bluestocking, an apostle of Vassar Kultur; and her customary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror. (The Hamilton Wright Mabie complex! The "white list" of novels!)