Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  James Branch Cabell

  In part from the New York Evening Mail, July 3, 1918, and in part from the New York American, Dec. 20, 1935

  His name is alone sufficient to separate him sharply from the latter-day Southerner: to be a Cabell in Virginia is almost equivalent to being a Cecil in England. And in the whole bent of his mind there are belated evidences of that aristocratic tradition which came to its doom at Appomattox. He is remote, unperturbed, skeptical, leisurely, a man sensitive to elusive and delicate values. The thing that interests him is the inutile thing. He likes to toy with ideas, and is impatient of purposes. Reacting against the sordid and ignoble culture surrounding him, he seeks escape in bold and often extravagant projections of the fancy. In brief, a true artist, a civilized man—set down among oafish hawkers and peasants like a lone cocktail at a banquet of chautauqua orators.

  What one finds, above all, in such books as “The Cream of the Jest,” “The Eagle’s Shadow,” and “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck” is style—a painter’s feeling for form and color, a musician’s feeling for rhythm. The thing said, though it is often excellent, is of secondary consideration: of chief importance is the way of saying it. And that way does not stop at the mere choice of words; it extends to the sentence as a whole, to the chapter as a whole: there is an adept search for the right measure, the right cadence. Reading Cabell, one gets a sense of a flow of harmonious sound. The inner ear responds to a movement that is subtly correct and satisfying. Such writing, of course, is very rare in America. When our novelists and essayists attempt it, the best they commonly achieve is a sort of idiotic sing-song—the sonorous gurgling of an evangelist exhorting sinners. But in Cabell’s prose the trick is somehow managed. In Cabell there is vastly more than juicy three-four time, as there was vastly more in Synge, Wilde and Pater.

  What lies under the style—and often the style is so charming that one doesn’t look much beyond it—is the quality of irony, the somewhat disdainful detachment of a man who is beyond taking his fable seriously, but not beyond sensing every atom of its comedy. This quality, in our American writing, is almost as rare as sound prose. Our typical novelist is quite incapable of it. He not only believes that his tale is important; he also commonly believes that some great piece of moral philosophy (or theology) lies imbedded in it—that there is a message there for suffering humanity capable of curing our metaphysical chilblains if we will only heed it.

  The peculiar charm of Cabell’s romances of Poictesme does not lie in the fact that his heroes practise magic and slaughter dragons, for such things have been going on in fairy tales since time immemorial; it lies in the fact that they carry on their fantastic operations in the manner of honest American Rotarians, stopping anon to take lunch, to scratch themselves, and to slang their wives. It is, of course, not easy to manage the dichotomy. A bad author would make either the magic incredible or the heroes unreal. But Cabell, having great skill at such tricks, keeps both balls in the air very neatly, and the result, say in “The High Place,” is an extremely amusing book, full of both gaudy nonsense and penetrating observation. One recognizes the people as real, and, having so recognized them, one is ready to follow them through wholly fabulous adventures.

  In Cabell’s so-called realistic stories—for example, “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck”—the thing runs the other way. The people here are undoubtedly as real as the cop on the corner, but nevertheless they are deftly hoisted above the commonplace, and made to perform in a very romantic way. They do things that are plausibly natural, and yet very far from the usual; their thoughts are yours and mine, and yet they reach bizarre conclusions. In brief, they are real people treated romantically, just as the dragon-chasers of Poictesme are romantics treated realistically. The effect in both cases is much the same. One enjoys the solid pleasure of recognition, and yet one is taken on an exhilarating flight through empyrean.

  Not in French

  From the Smart Set, Jan., 1920, 138–40.

  A review of JURGEN, by James Branch Cabell; New York, 1919

  “Jurgen,” estimated by current American standards, whether of the boobery or of the super-boobery, is everything that is abhorrent. On the negative side, it lacks all Inspiration, all Optimism, all tendency to whoop up the Finer Things; it moves toward no shining Goal; it even neglects to denounce Pessimism, Marital Infidelity, Bolshevism, the Alien Menace and German Kultur. And on the positive side it piles up sins unspeakable: it is full of racy and mirthful ideas, it is brilliantly written, it is novel and daring, it is ribald, it is heretical, it is blasphemous, it is Rabelaisian. Such a book simply refuses to fit into the decorous mid-Victorian pattern of American letters. It belongs to some outlandish literature, most probably the French. One might imagine it written by a member of the French Academy, say Anatole France. But could one imagine it written by a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, say Bliss Perry? The thought is not only fantastic; it is almost obscene.

  Cabell came near sneaking into refined society, a few years ago, as a novelist. Several of his novels, like the earlier pieces of Hergesheimer, trembled on the verge of polite acceptance. Both writers were handicapped by having ears. They wrote English that was delicately musical and colorful—and hence incurably offensive to constant readers of Rex Beach, Thomas H. Dixon, and the New York Times. Hergesheimer finally atoned for his style by mastering the popular novelette formula; thereafter he was in the Saturday Evening Post and the old maids who review books for the newspapers began to praise him. A few weeks ago I received an invitation to hear him lecture before a Browning Society; in a year or two, if he continues to be good, he will be elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in full equality with Ernest Poole, Oliver Herford, Henry Sydnor Harrison and E. W. Townsend, author of “Chimmie Fadden.” Cabell, I fear, must resign himself to doing without the accolade. “Beyond Life” spilled many a bean; beneath its rumblings one discerned more than one cackle of satanic laughter. “Jurgen” wrecks the whole beanery. It is a compendium of backwardlooking and wrong-thinking. It is a Devil’s sonata, an infernal Kindersinfonie for slap-stick, seltzer-siphon and bladder-on-a-string.… And, too, for the caressing violin, the lovely and melancholy flute. How charmingly the fellow writes! What a hand for the slick and slippery phrase he has! How cunningly he winds up a sentence, and then flicks it out with a twist of the wrist—a shimmering, dazzling shower of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions! It is curious how often the gift of irony is coupled with pedantry. Think of old Francois and his astounding citations from incredible authorities—almost like an article in a German medical journal. Or of Anatole France. Or of Swift. Cabell, in “Jurgen,” borrows all the best hocus-pocus of the professors. He reconstructs an imaginary medieval legend with all the attention to detail of the pundits who publish college editions of “Aucassin et Nicolette”; until, toward the end, his own exuberance intoxicates him a bit, he actually makes it seem a genuine translation. But his Jurgen, of course, is never a medieval man. No; Jurgen is horribly modern. Jurgen is the modern man in reaction against a skepticism that explains everything away and yet leaves everything inexplicable. He is the modern man in doubt of all things, including especially his own doubts. So his quest is no heroic enterprise, though it takes him over half the earth and into all the gaudiest and most romantic kingdoms thereof, for the thing that he seeks is not a great hazard and an Homeric death but simply ease and contentment, and what he comes to in the end is the discovery that they are nowhere to be found, not even in the arms of a royal princess. Jurgen acquires the shirt of Nessus and the magical sword Caliburn; he becomes Duke of Logreus, Prince Consort in Cocaigne, King of Eubonia, and Emperor of Noumaria; he meets and loves the incomparable Guenevere in the moonlight on the eve of her marriage to King Arthur; he unveils the beauty of Helen of Troy; he is taught all the ineffable secrets of love by Queen Anaïtis; he becomes a great poet; he sees strange coasts; he roams the whole universe. But in the end, he ret
urns sadly to a world “wherein the result of every human endeavor is transient and the end of all is death,” and takes his old place behind the counter of his pawnshop, and resumes philosophically his interrupted feud with his faded wife, Dame Lisa.

  In brief, a very simple tale, and as old in its fundamental dolorousness as arterio-sclerosis. What gives it its high quality is the richness of its detail—the prodigious gorgeousness of its imagery, the dramatic effectiveness of its shifting scenes, the whole glow and gusto of it. Here, at all events, it is medieval. Here Cabell evokes an atmosphere that is the very essence of charm. Nothing could be more delightfully done than some of the episodes—that of Jurgen’s meeting with Guenevere in the Hall of Judgment; that of his dialogue with old King Gogyrvan Gawr, that of his adventure with the Hamadryad, that of the ceremony of the Breaking of the Veil, that of his invasion of the bed-chamber of Helen of Troy. The man who could imagine such scenes is a first-rate artist, and in the manner of their execution he proves the fact again. Time and again they seem to be dissolving, shaking a bit, going to pieces—but always he carries them off. And always neatly, delicately, with an air. The humor of them has its perils; to Puritans it must often seem shocking; it might easily become gross. But here it is no more gross than a rose-window.…

  Toward the end, alack, the thing falls down. The transition from heathen Olympuses and Arcadies to the Christian Heaven and Hell works an inevitable debasement of the comedy. The satire here ceases to be light-fingered and becomes heavy-handed: “the religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.” It is almost like making fun of a man with inflammatory rheumatism. Perhaps the essential thing is that the book is a trifle too long. By the time one comes to Calvinism, democracy, and the moral order of the world one has begun to feel surfeited. But where is there a work of art without a blemish? Even Beethoven occasionally misses fire. This “Jurgen,” for all such ifs and buts, is a very fine thing. It is a great pity that it was not written in French. Done in English, and printed in These States, it somehow suggests Brahms scoring his Fourth Symphony for a jazz band and giving it at an annual convention of the Knights of Pythias.

  Jack London

  From PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 236–39.

  London was born in 1876 and died in 1916

  The quasi-science of genealogy, as it is practised in the United States, is directed almost exclusively toward establishing aristocratic descents for nobodies. That is to say, it records and glorifies decay. Its typical masterpiece is the discovery that the wife of some obscure county judge is the grandchild, infinitely removed, of Mary Queen of Scots, or that the blood of Geoffrey of Monmouth flows in the veins of a Philadelphia stock-broker. How much more profitably its professors might be employed in tracing the lineage of truly salient men. For example, Jack London. Where did he get his hot artistic passion, his delicate feeling for form and color, his extraordinary skill with words? The man, in truth, was an instinctive artist of a very respectable order, and if ignorance often corrupted his art, it only made the fact of his inborn skill the more remarkable. No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in “The Call of the Wild,” or in parts of “John Barleycorn,” or in such short stories as “The Sea Farmer” and “Samuel.” Here, indeed, are all the elements of sound fiction: clear thinking, a sense of character, the dramatic instinct, and, above all, the adept putting together of words—words charming and slyly significant, words arranged, in a French phrase, for the respiration and the ear. You will never convince me that this aesthetic sensitiveness, so rare, so precious, so distinctively aristocratic, burst into abiogenetic flower on a San Francisco sand-lot. There must have been some intrusion of an alien and superior strain, some pianissimo fillip from above; there was obviously a great deal more to the thing than a routine hatching in low life.

  But London the artist did not live a cappella. There was also London the Great Thinker, and the second often hamstrung the first. That great thinking of his, of course, took color from the misery of his early life; it was, in the main, a jejune Socialism, wholly uncriticised by humor. Some of his propagandist and expository books are almost unbelievably nonsensical, and whenever he allowed any of his so-called ideas to sneak into an imaginative work the intrusion promptly spoiled it. Socialism, in truth, is quite incompatible with art; its cook-tent materialism is fundamentally at war with the first principle of the aesthetic gospel, which is that one daffodil is worth ten shares of Bethlehem Steel. It is not by accident that there has never been a book on Socialism which was also a work of art. Papa Marx’s “Das Kapital” at once comes to mind. It is as wholly devoid of graces as “The Origin of Species” or “Science and Health”; one simply cannot conceive a reasonable man reading it without aversion; it is as revolting as a barrel organ. London, preaching Socialism, or quasi-Socialism, or whatever it was that he preached, took over this offensive dullness. The materialistic conception of history was too heavy a load for him to carry. When he would create beautiful books he had to throw it overboard as Wagner threw overboard democracy, the superman and free thought. A sort of temporary Christian created “Parsifal.” A sort of temporary aristocrat created “The Call of the Wild.”

  Also in another way London’s early absorption of social and economic nostrums damaged him. It led him into the typical socialistic exaltation of mere money; it put a touch of avarice into him. Hence his too deadly industry, his relentless thousand words a day, his steady emission of half-done books. The prophet of freedom, he yet sold himself into slavery to the publishers, and paid off with his soul for his ranch, his horses, his trappings of a wealthy cheese-monger. His volumes rolled out almost as fast as those of E. Phillips Oppenheim; he simply could not make them all good at such a gait. There are books on his list that are little more than garrulous notes for books. But even in the worst of them one comes upon sudden splashes of brilliant color, stray proofs of the adept penman, half-wistful reminders that London, at bottom, was really an artist. There was in him a vast delicacy of perception, a high feeling, a sensitiveness to beauty. And there was in him, too, under all his blatancies, a poignant sense of the infinite romance and mystery of human life.

  Dreiser as Philosopher

  From the Smart Set, May, 1920, pp. 138–40.

  A review of HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB, by Theodore Dreiser; New York, 1920

  It is easy enough to understand the impulse which prompted Dreiser to write “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” his new book of essays and fulminations all compact. There comes times in every sentient man’s life when he must simply unload his ideas, or bust like a star-shell in the highroad. If he is at that end of the scale which touches the rising ladder of the Simiidae he becomes a Socialist on a soap-box or joins the Salvation Army; if he is literate and has a soul he writes a book. Hence the great, whirring, infernal machines which chew up the forests of Canada, now and then salting the dose with the leg or arm of a Canuck. Hence the huge ink industry, consuming five million tons of bone-black a year. Hence democracy, Bolshevism, the moral order of the world. Hence sorrow. Hence literature.

  In every line of “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub” there is evidence of the author’s antecedent agony. One pictures him sitting up all night in his sinister studio down in Tenth street, wrestling horribly with the insoluble, trying his darndest to penetrate the unknowable. One o’clock strikes, and the fire sputters. Ghosts stalk in the room, fanning the yellow candle-light with their abominable breath—the spooks of all the men who have died for ideas since the world began—Socrates, Savonarola, Bruno (not Guido, but Giordano), Ravaillac, Sir Roger Casement, John Alexander Dowie, Dr. Crippen. Two o’clock. What, then, is the truth about marriage? Is it, as Grover Cleveland said, a grand sweet song, or is it, as the gals in the Village say, a hideous mockery and masquerade, invented by Capitalism to enslave the soul of woman—a legalized Schweinerei, worse than politics, almost as bad as the moving-pictures? Three o’clock. Was Marx right or wrong, a seer or a mere nose-puller?
Was his name, in fact, actually Marx, or was it Marcus? From what ghetto did he escape, and cherishing what grudge complex: cherchez le Juif! (I confess at once: my great-grandpa, Moritz, was rector of the Oheb Shalon Schul in Grodno.) Three o’clock.…

  Back to Pontius Pilate! Quod est veritas? Try to define it. Look into it. Break it into its component parts. What remains is a pale gray vapor, an impalpable emanation, the shadow of a shadow. Think of the brains that have gone to wreck struggling with the problem—cerebrums as large as cauliflowers, cerebellums as perfect as pomegranates. Think of the men jailed, clubbed, hanged, burned at the stake—not for embracing error, but for embracing the wrong error. Think of the innumerable caravan of Burlesons, Mitchell Palmers, Torquemadas, Cotton Mathers.… Four o’clock. The fire burns low in the grate. A gray fog without. Across the street two detectives rob a drunken man. Up at Tarrytown John D. Rockefeller snores in his damp Baptist bed, dreaming gaudily that he is young again and mashed on a girl named Marie. At Sing Sing forty head of Italians are waiting to be electrocuted. There is a memorial service for Charles Garvice in Westminster Abbey. The Comstocks raid the Elsie books. Ludendorff is elected Archbishop of Canterbury. A poor working-girl, betrayed by Moe, the boss’s son, drowns herself in the Aquarium. It is late, ah me: nearly four thirty.… Who the deuce, then, is God? What is in all this talk of a future life, infant damnation, the Ouija board, Mortal Mind? Dr. Jacques Loeb is the father of a dozen bull-frogs. Is the news biological or theological? What became of the Albigenses? Are they in Heaven, in Purgatory or in Hell?… Five o’clock. Boys cry the Evening Journal. Is it today’s or tomorrow’s? The question of transubstantiation remains. There is, too, neo-transcendentalism.… In Munich they talk of Expressionismus … Poof!…