bishly intellectual, the perpetually bored; and to gain their attention he must be smartly original, brilliant, violent, arresting. The most certain solvent of boredom, he realizes, is humor; the O. Henry type of humor completely up to date and smashingly original. And he is master of the humor that is requisite; a humor more effective indeed than O. Henry's, since it is less obviously a straining for effect. Seldom have I laughed audibly over a page of O. Henry's, never over one of Irvin Cobb's, but I chuckled aloud the first time I read this:

The finish of a civilian in a luxurious hospital, with trained nurses fluttering over him and his pastor whooping and heaving for him at the foot of the bed, is often quite as terrible as any form of exitus witnessed in war.

The O. Henry likeness is largely a matter of style and expression, a disregard for exactness and truth; journalistic cleverness, vulgar sensation. One may open at random now: note the O. Henry paradox, the O. Henry triplets, the O. Henry smartness:

A Scotch Presbyterian with a soaring soul is as cruelly beset as a wolf with fleas, or a zebra with the botts. Let a spark of the divine fire spring to life in that arid corpse, and it must fight its way to flame through a drum fire of wet sponges. A humming bird immersed in kartoffelsuppe. Walter Pater writing for the London Daily Mail. Lucullus travelling steerage.

He [Shaw] founded, in England the superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tin-pot evangelist—a sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst and the syndics of the Sex Hygiene Society.

Here we have a situation in comedy almost exactly parallel to that in which a colored bishop whoops "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" like a calliope in order to drown out the crowing of the rooster concealed beneath his chasuble.

Down there [in Dixie] a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.

Good health in man, indeed, is almost invariably a function of inferiority. A professionally healthy man, e. g., an acrobat, an osteopath or an ice-wagon driver, is always stupid.

If that time ever comes, the manufacture of artists will become a feasible procedure, like the present manufacture of soldiers, capons, right-thinkers and doctors of philosophy.

The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the transition stage between Christian Endeavor and civilization. One by searching may find still smarter examples:

One would not be surprised to hear that, until he [George Ade] went off to his freshwater college, he slept in his underwear and read the Epworth Herald.

Oppenheim... stands, as to one leg, on the shoulders of Walt Whitman, and, as to the other, on a stack of Old Testaments.

It is a sort of college town Weltanschauung that one finds in him [Howells]; he is an Agnes Repplier in pantaloons.

Here [in Bennett's novels] we have a sweet commingling of virtuous conformity and complacent optimism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty—here, in brief, we have the philosophy of the English middle classes—and here, by the same token, we have the sort of guff that the half-educated of our own country understand. It is the calm, superior numskullery that was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles out of Hannah More.

And this last from the author who finds in Poe "congenital vulgarity of taste":

This man, for all his grand dreams, had a shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to the era of cuspidors, "females," and Sons of Temperance.

It is unnecessary to comment. To some, perhaps, this is literary criticism. Perhaps.

IV

The professor is nothing if not a maker of card indexes; he must classify or be damned. His master

piece is the dictum that "it is excellent, but it is not a play."

Yes, I am listening. But what if it is not excellent? what if it is labeled a play on its yellow jacket and made emphatic by adjectives in the superlative? What if it is sold as a play, and whooped up as a play on all the bill-boards, and reviewed as a play by all the reviewers, and what if it is not a play at all, but a mere vaudeville stunt? The whole transaction becomes then a sign of the times. It is felony under the pure food laws to brand a package "California honey" when it is Missouri corn syrup, even though the corn syrup is excellent. Am I concerned only with the name, only with niceties of technique, with manner and traditions? If that were all then I would deserve all the sarcasm that the tribe of Mencken has heaped upon my profession. The very foundations are in question. Criticism should be rulings of a supreme court of literature. Whatever else is extreme and impassioned, criticism should be serene; whatever else is distorted, criticism should be the truth. And Mencken, touch him where you will, is extreme and distorted. He leaves sacrifice and service out of his philosophy of life and thus reduces it to a mere zero. He is the Nietzsche of our literature, and of Nietzsche, as we have already

quoted, "no charge was too far-fetched, no manipulation or interpretation of evidence was too daring, to enter into his ferocious indictment." He was not seeking the truth: he was hurling his dogmas.

Mencken is a journalist, and the curse of the journalist, as already we have seen, is that he has lost his horizon. His work he pitches ever to the almighty Now. He must be heard instantly: he must bring methods and materials startlingly new or see his work drop dead from the press. When he speaks he must speak in falsetto; when he means three he must say nine. When Mark Twain—a journalist to his finger tips-wished to convey the fact that the characters in Cooper's novels are stiff and wooden, he expressed it this way: it is impossible to tell in his novels the living people from the corpses save that the corpses are more lively. It is not true: it is farce, pure and simple, and not criticism, but "it is what you must write if you are to be read in these days." The journalist is prone to forget that the history of literature is the history of a long evolution, that there are fashions in literature as surely as there are fashions in dress, and that the fashions of 1850 are no more asinine than the fashions of 1922. Shall one call one's grandfather an ass because he enjoyed literature that to-day would not be accepted by "The Smart Set"? Mencken damns George William Curtis as a "shoddy medi