Volume 150, Number 12, THE OUTLOOK AND INDEPENDENT, November 21, 1928. Published weekly by The Outlook Company at 120 East 16th Street, New York, N. Y. Subscription price $5.00 a year. Single copies 15 cents each. Foreign subscription to countries in the Postal Union, $6.56. Entered as second-class matter, July 21, 1893, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., and July 20, 1928, at the Post Office at Springfield, Mass., under the Act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1928, by The Outlook Company.

ONE THING, among others, which the recent campaign has made very evident is the fact that great numbers of people in this country are dissatisfied with the present workings of the Volstead Act; and that practically all would like to know if any change which would genuinely promote temperance and not bring back the saloon is possible or practical.

IN THE PRESENT state of affairs, however, genuine, reliable and complete information on the subject is very difficult to secure. No nation wide, impartial investigation has been made. In practically all cases of incomplete investigation, bias is evident in the scattered presentation of whatever facts have been ascertained.

CERTAINLY the directors of any business which had been conducting an experiment would begin to consider it necessary to make some report to their stockholders once the experiment had been in process for over seven and a half years. Such a report might show that the experiment's chances of ultimate success were good enough to warrant not only continuing the experiment but making a larger appropriation for it. Or it might show that so many factors were against it that it should be abandoned for another method of attaining the desired result.

TO OUR MIND Mr. Hoover could do nothing better calculated to enhance his reputation as a clear-sighted leader than to recommend such an investigation to Congress in his first address next March. Certainly no one is better fitted than he to advise on such a report on the great experiment, as he has termed it. And we know of no one whose statements would be received with greater confidence.

LET US HAVE the real facts on enforcement: its results, achievements and difficulties. And let Americans stop abusing each other on the subject and impugning each other's motives, ethics and principles.

Francis Profus Bellamy

and Independent

November 21, 1928

ENRY L. MENCKEN, editor of the "American Mercury," has been, for period of roughly twenty ars, a force in American lets. For the ten years just st he has been more than at. He has, in himself, comsed, almost indisputably, the ost powerful critical influice at work in this country, ad certainly that one most nstantly discussed, combatted - applauded. He has been ariously estimated. To the

Mencken

By CAMERON ROGERS

te Stuart P. Sherman, for example, was a critic for flappers. To Edmund ilson he is a genuine artist. To Frank arris, one of the best critics in Engsh; to Carl Van Doren, a writer rembling in some fashion Poe, Whitman id Mark Twain; to Burton Rascoe, a atural product of American traditions, aining and character; to the Irishman, incent O'Sullivan, a product as Ameran as pumpkin pie or a Riker drug ore; and to L. M. Hussey, a writer ho is primarily emotional and creative, nd so, therefore, primarily an artist.

He has, in other words, possessed and dministered in his critical writing so dividual and vital a personality that ontemporaries have been unable to igeon-hole him or gauge to their satisaction the precise sphere of his influnce and the validity of his opinions. During the last decade Mencken has onstantly defied those who would exlain him, catalogue him and so spike is guns. His strength has been his on-conformity, his brawling disagreeaent with accepted canons of American ife, customs and behavior, and until ecently this strength had remained indiminished. Now, however, it is

definitely impaired and for two reasons. One is that he has been accepted and his protestant clamor no longer attracts an attention either startled or reverent. The other, that he has done his work, and having written with an admirable emphasis of things about which he knows a great deal, he now either chooses, or is forced, or both, to write of things about which he knows very little.

In his time Mencken has constituted, for many intelligent people, a sovereign formative influence. But his time is very nearly past because the premises of his prosecutions have become too familiar, and a rising generation will persist in regarding him not as an enlightened Ishmael bawling wisdom in the waste places of American boobery,

inspiring diapason of ridicule. He will continue to uncover in American life those preposterous beliefs, shibboleths and manners at which he has been mocking for years but in so doing he will no longer occasion amazement. For he has taught too many pupils to observe these things for themselves, and he has taught them so thoroughly that they no longer require his schooling.

However it is not yet to be inferred that Mencken is, quite hopelessly, a spent man. If there ever be in the United States a national prohibition of tobacco, for instance, or a Constitutional instrument forbidding the further glorification of the American girl as directed by revue producers, his voice may again be raised in all its ancient plenitude and with all its ancient epithets of scorn. But, unfortunately, it seems quite likely that in that time there will be voices younger and stronger, voices compact with an invective perhaps even more rigorous than his own, so that, in the main, his usefulness is at an end.

But let us, in the light of all this, a light which would seem to reveal an epitaph, examine his career.

E WAS BORN in Baltimore in 1880,

forceful, editor with a failing for repetition. For a prophet to be with honor in his own country means the end of that prophet as a prophet. Mencken is just such a one. The Shermans, the Munsons and the Calvertons, the Pattees and the Boyntons have ceased to strive with him and so have ceased to impel him to a greater, more raucous and more

the Baltimore Polytechnic, and he was inducted into professional journalism at the age of nineteen. He served as a cub reporter on the Baltimore "Herald" and his first printed piece of reporting was the following terse statement of fact:

"At Otterheim Memorial, United Brethren Church, Roland and Fifth

In

Avenue, Hampden, Charles H. Stanley and J. Albert Loose entertained a large audience last night with an exhibition of war scenes by a cineograph." An item which, taken in relation to his now notable phobias, seems filled with a gentle irony. This was in 1899. 1900 he contributed a few short stories to magazines such as "Leslie's," and Ellery Sedgwick, then conducting that periodical, was so favorably impressed by one that he offered Mencken the post of associate editor. Mencken, refusing this, became Sunday editor of the Baltimore "Herald" in 1901, city editor in 1903, managing editor in 1904 and editor-in-chief in the following year at

the

age of five and twenty. His abilities were so manifest that when in 1906 the Baltimore "Herald," to employ a graphic idiom, "folded up," he was appointed news editor of the Baltimore "Evening News," then Sunday editor of the Baltimore "Sun," during which latter employment he emerged definitely from comparative obscurity in the rôle of the militant and always audible critic. It was during this period that he commenced to fall upon what he considered to be the frauds of the day. He laughed at the New Theatre idea then sprouting in New York, gibed at Richard Mansfield and engaged to cry up the dramatic talents of George Bernard Shaw.

Almost at once people began to read his work, a few with applause, a great many with frequently expressed distaste. In 1908, at the suggestion of Theodore Dreiser, an author in whose behalf he has long battled with adverse opinion, he became literary critic of the "Smart Set" and for the next six years applied himself with his peculiar gusto, here to criticism of books, there to that of personalities and to that of the orthodox texture of American life everywhere. He conducted a column in the Baltimore "Sun" entitled "The Free Lance" and instantly aroused an opposition that would have appalled a less resolute character. Mencken fed on opposition, probed, flayed, laughed coarsely and wooed enemies. He made no effort to enlist a following and of course, secured one, but one which, fortunately, remained small as compared to the foe. In 1914, with George Jean Nathan, whom he had met and with whom he had formed a friendship four years earlier, he became joint editor of the "Smart Set" and as such, during the next ten years, achieved his fullest sig

nificance as a critical influence not only in American letters but in an increasing degree in American life. In 1924 he was instrumental in founding the "American Mercury" and became its editor, and since 1924 has become less and less the spokesman of an intelligently caustic minority, and more and more the accepted and almost supreme arbiter of men and women whose mental processes he has now ceased any more to astonish.

Here briefly and in rough chronology is the substance of Mencken's career. He is still a young man but he raised his voice when he was, comparatively

MENCKEN

speaking, so very young, and he has used it so consistently, that he has already given us his all, told us all he knows, taught us all that he has to teach. For there can and should be no such thing in the world as a sound critic of life in its every aspect, and to function as just such an agent of the Omniscient Intelligence is palpably his present ambition. Indeed, it is the only sign that he gives of approaching fifty. While his writing, as his biographer, Isaac Goldberg, points out, remains that of a young man, the subjects upon

which he employs it balk at conclusive treatment. His mind's eye, trained one upon specific evils, frauds and follie seeks now to encompass the whol hodge-podge of universal errors, an these are too diffuse, too complex, to vague in his own understanding, t permit success. One may concisel trace the progress of this abandonmen of an impregnable position for on which does not exist at all, in the si volumes entitled "Prejudices," an which contain, the first of them, the bes work of his "Smart Set" days, and th last of them, his still vigorous but in creasingly meaningless disquisitions o

"The Nature of Man," "Govern ment," "The Nature of Love" an the like. These, written, it true, as only he can write, are n meaningless save for one cardin reason. They are not incohere or unintelligent or dull. The are meaningless simply becaus Mencken knows very little mo about any of them than do h readers and about some of them it is quite possible, rather less.

When he took a specific man e book and built around such subject an edifice of shrewd cer ment, sometimes devastating b frequently excellent criticis and always revealing statemen he was as nearly infallible as an critic can be, and more inspirin infinitely more influential an effective. If you will look in the first volume of these "Prejdices" you will find estimates H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennet George Ade and others whic

judged by any but a purel academic standard of criticism, surpa any kindred work of these times. The shocked many critics, even surprised th late Stuart P. Sherman, himself, befo he came to New York, an excellen commentator upon letters, into a pall satire of rebuke, but they will outlin far more pretentious critiques, ever perhaps, far more scholarly ones, be cause of a vitality and fierce perception elsewhere unequaled in this generation It has been authoritatively stated tha Mencken is not a literary critic at al but a critic of his times in all thei manifestations. This, to precisely the extent, is true. He is not, sui generis a literary critic such as, let us say, wa Hazlitt. Nor is he, however, sui generis a critic of his times. In him the fune tions of both are so nicely combinee as to achieve a double result. For an author or a book or even a public figure

uch as was the late William Jennings Bryan is the glass through which he ooks at his times, examines their magified defects and assumes his concluions. Remove that author, or that -ook, or that personage, and he stares t a landscape too vast to be compreended by any human critical retina, oo sprawling, too general for any intructive scrutiny. Through his glass e has been able to particularize, to oncentrate upon one social malady, xpose its symptoms, prescribe for them and pass on to another. But without is glass he is lost. He sees everything and at the same time nothing, and so s able to diagnose with no more

men as Stuart P. Sherman to look upon him as an intolerable boor, and that

class of readers of which Sherman was the spokesman, then by far the largest in the country, to do likewise. But, in the minds of a few, Mencken had sown the seed. While Sherman did all the thinking for his flock, Mencken taught his to think for themselves. And since Sherman was not a critic of contemporary letters at all, but a man of sound scholarship merely in the tradition of letters, he actually impeded the development of individual critical thought while Mencken cried it on.

UT AT THAT TIME Mencken was the

hose very evils which he would cauterze with the hot iron of his mockery. Mencken, writing objectively, and with specific target for his criticism, has een an important influence upon the development of the contemporary American mind. Writing subjectively ipon general human problems he has been and will remain, ineffective.

T IS significant, here, to observe that it was when he ceased to be Mencken the Maverick and became the bellwether of the herd, that he translated himself from one critical see to the other. When, ten or fifteen years ago, The pointed out to an outraged majority that H. G. Wells, who had once been "the most brilliant, if not always the most profound, of contemporary English novelists," had yielded to a "process of gradual and obscure decay" he awoke hard feelings but also many intelligent readers to the realization that Wells had, in fact, been of late producing novels which were not only dull but pitifully commonplace. It is true that he did not at once materially damage Wells's American sales, but he bred a severe disaffection in the ranks, incited a rebellion in many minds, to the touted clap-trap of once talented but now empty English authors. Ten or fifteen years ago the attitude of American criticism toward Wells or Bennett was an attitude not critical in the least. Men acutely perceptive to the faults of American authors reviewed "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" and abased themselves before its very ordinary qualities as though the hand of God had wrought them. Mencken, though his work in this respect has been far from completely successful, changed all this. In a word, he was honest. Instead of writing testimonials he wrote criticisms and that he should dare to do so caused such

with every clay ikon that he smashed and every false standard of excellence that he attacked. And also he continued, and more and more perceptibly, to mold the minds of a group of men and women which grew larger year by year. His ultimate reception by the herd was the inevitable result, and almost coincidentally he renounced objective criticism, threw away his glass, and assumed the conduct of the Omniscient. It is not, of course, inconceivable that such an action was forced upon him by the fact that of late years he has had very little at which to swing. When the occasion arises, when, as happened in 1925, he has a Bryan at which to shoot, he is again Mencken the Maverick. But with this distinction. Ten or fifteen years ago he was a Maverick to Stuart P. Sherman's army of bottle-fed intelligences. Today he is a Maverick only to an army which is bereft of any intelligences at all. Yesterday he at least had intelligences with which to work. The trouble is that he worked with them too well and showed too many of them the light. Today he can be of no more use because there remain too few who still deny him.

Mencken's writing, the prose style which has been his weapon, has remained, it is gratifying to observe, comparatively unaffected by his critical apotheosis. This style, like its possessor, made enemies, awoke at one time a considerable academic uproar and a strange disquiet even in the breasts of his warmest admirers. At its best it is clear, forceful and witty. At its worst it is boisterous, affected, and sometimes in bad taste judged by any standards of writing. Stuart P. Sherman, whose opinions touching style were always sound, esteemed it as being hard, pointed, forcible and cocksure. It is, certainly, all of that. Its faults, in

point of fact, are few and candid. Like his friend and one-time co-editor, George Jean Nathan, Mencken has a weakness, more, a vice, for needlessly interpolating into his prose a variety of German expressions which add nothing to emphasis of content and which constitute so naïve an effect of sophomoric cleverness as to astound readers who revere his abilities. If these expressions were French instead of German how palpable would seem the absurdity of their usage by an otherwise first-rate author writing in the English language. The fact that they are in a tongue for some reason considered less precious by the herd somewhat diminishes the mischief, but only in the case of his unilingual admirers who, if they possess any feeling for good writing, will still object. Mencken, it would seem, cannot write police when he means police. He must write Polizei. If he would refer to scholars a mysterious compulsion directs that he write Gelehrten. Does he wish to speak of the Home for the Aged? then he puts hand to dictionary and plucks out Greisenheim. Or if he would make use of the word employment or would simply mention the day's work, the same obscure inhibition forbids him to put on paper the English word and he inscribes Geschaft instead. He has actually disfigured an otherwise delightful essay on Huneker by hammering into the opening paragraph the word Doppelschraubenschnell postdampfer, and why? Merely to avoid the necessity of writing twin-screw mail packet. Such a procedure makes, of course, for an effect at once ridiculous and uncouth and is, if you like, the worst flaw in his style. But save for an occasional abuse of such expressions as pish-posh, and a sometimes tedious reiteration of such nomenclature as Homo Boobiens, Boobus Americanus and the rest of that familiar terminology, it would be hard to find another.

INT

·NDEED, as a medium of satire, invective or praise, Mencken's style has no equal, even today when he has nothing more about which to write and has fallen back upon subjects to the exposition of which no style might lend a reasonable coherence or a tolerable validity. It is not polished. It is frequently ungraceful. It is as bare of ornament as is an elm of leaves in January. But it remains as memorable as the date of one's birthday, and most especially does it so remain to those men (Please Turn to Page 1224)