The Literary Criticism of H. L: Mencken

THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF H.
L: MENCKEN
APPROVED:
Professor
inor Professor
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Director of tWe Department of English
Dean of the Graduate School

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Sellers, Stephen W., The Literary Criticism of H. L.

Mencken. Master of Arts (English), December, 1970, 111 pp.,
bibliography, 55 titles.
This study reviews H. L. Mencken's criticism of fiction,
poetry, and drama. Although Mencken's role in liberating
American literature from the bonds of the genteel tradition
has been generally acknowledged, it is commonly alleged that
he was no literary critic but a mere reviewer who engaged
primarily in polemics. Further it is said that he lacked
standards, taste, and judgment. The thesis of this paper is
that Mencken was a better critic than he is credited with
being, that he was unusually discerning in his judgment of
the fiction of his time, and that his criteria are clearly
stated in various of his writings. It is conceded, however,
that his taste in poetry was limited and that his contribu-
tion to dramatic criticism was not? greatly significant.
It is argued that Mencken's early enthusiasm for writers

Who are today considered among the best of the realistic-
naturalistic tradition gives proof of his judgment and taste.
The praise which he gave to Twain and Conrad is cited as well
as the recognition which he accorded Willa Cather, Sinclair
Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His
championship of Dreiser provides further evidence of his
discernment and of his willingness to combat popular and
genteel taste.
1
Mencken's criticism of drama and poetry is reviewed,
but no claim is made for his having unusual discrimination
in these fields. It is stated that his early writing on
Shaw, Ibsen, and other European dramatists helped to give
them a broader audience in this country and that he contrib-
uted to the recognition of Eugene O'Neill. An even slighter
claim is made for Mencken as a critic of poetry. He is
shown to have appreciated the verse of Wilde, Kipling,
Bridges, Hardy, and the early Pound but to have had more
interest in Lizette Woodworth Reese than in Robert Frost or
Edwin Arlington Robinson.
This study recognizes limitations in Mencken's taste

and in his practice of criticism—a poverty of analysis, a
narrow concept of poetry, a conservatism which kept him from
appreciating many of the innovations of his time. But it
claims for him unusual perception as a critic of fiction as
shown by his early praise of writers, whom we today consider
as eminent. And it asserts that he made an enviable record
r
in that most difficult of tasks--the day-to-day judgment of

new writers and new works.
THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF H. L. MENCKEN
THESIS
Presented to the Graduate Council of the

North Texas State University in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
By
Stephen W. Sellers, B.A.

Denton, Texas
December, 1970
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION . 1
II. THE CRITICAL CLIMATE 8
III. MENCKEN'S CRITICISM OF FICTION 33
IV. MENCKEN'S CRITICISM OF POETRY 64
V. MENCKEN'S CRITICISM OF DRAMA 85
VI. CONCLUSION 104
BIBLIOGRAPHY 108
ill
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The last few years have brought a spate of books about

Henry Mencken. William Nolte's H. L. Mencken: Literary
Critic (1964), Sara Mayfield's The Constant Circle: H. L.
Mencken and His Friends (196 8), and Carl Bode's Mencken
(1969) shed light both on his life and work. In addition
there is Guy Forgue's book in French, H. L. Mencken; the
Man, the Work, the Influence (1967), which Edmund Wilson
terms as superior to any study by an American.1 It seems
that there has been a revival of interest in this Baltimore
newspaper man and editor. However, it is not as if he had
been at any time forgotten, for a respectable number of his
works have stayed in print as well as two books of selections
from his writings made in the fifties and two in the sixties.2
Either he has been finding new readers or the house of KnopT
Has displayed notable loyalty to one of its earliest writers.
1
Edmund Wilson, "The Aftermath of Mencken," New Yorker,
XLV (May 31, 1969), 110.
2
Alxstair Cooke, editor, The Vintage Mencken (New York,
1955); James T. Farrell, editor, H. L. Mencken: Prejudices:
A Selection (New York, 1958); Huntington Cairns, editor
M: k: Mencken: The American Scene (New York, 1965);
William H. Nolte, editor, H. L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism
(Ithaca, 1968). ~ ~
Mencken was a remarkably versatile man: short-story
writer, poet, composer, editor, literary critic, social
critic, philosopher, philologist, and superb reporter of the
political scene. He was something more than a jack-of-all-
trades, however; for in several of these fields his accom-
plishments have enriched the national life. Probably his
major gift was for language. He wrote with clarity and
force, and few have surpassed him in power of ridicule and
invective. Moreover, his book The American Language is con-
sidered a major contribution to scholarship.
When he came on the national scene as editor of the
Smart Set and later of the American Mercury, he did not
restrict himself to his literary column but took as his
subject the inanities of our national life and its intellec-
tual and emotional sterility. A convinced Darwinian and a
follower of Nietzsche, he held up to ridicule the excesses
of a sometimes complacent and sentimental Christianity and
howled with glee over the absurdities of our political life.
He jeered at the fraternal orders and service clubs, the
Y.M.C.A.'s, ladies' literary societies, and other instruments
of social uplift. His favorite target was the "Bluenoses,"
the professional reformers who would dictate morality to
others, but he also struck broadly at the taste and manners
of the underbred, the "lumpen proletariat" or the "booboisie"
as he delighted to call our solid citizens. His ridicule
and epithets did not go without answer. He was assailed in
editorial columns and from pulpit and platform as a low
fellow and beneath the public scorn. Some invited him to
return to the Germany of his forbears, but in typical fashion
he replied that the United States was too good a circus to
leave.
His irreverence and iconoclasm shocked and delighted
many of the immature, but also he attracted a much more solid
following. A new generation of intellectuals saw our
national culture much as Mencken did—provincial and, in
essence, puritanical and materialistic. From their view-
point we were aesthetically an undeveloped people; in letters
our national voice was timid and thin; in music, painting,
and architecture we produced pale copies of European
originals. For this new generation, Mencken's Smart Set
became a voice for young, critical America. To some it was
more than this: it brought a verve and sophistication un-
known to our more stolid literary ^journals and it brought a
succession of European authors previously unpublished in
this country. Unfamiliar names like Max Beerbohm, Andre
Brieux, George Moore, August Strindberg, D. H. Lawrence, and
William Butler Yeats were seen on its pages. Edmund Wilson
in a recent New Yorker review has spoken of what this maga-
3
z m e meant to him and others. Ben Hecht in his autobiography
4
said that Mencken was his university.
3
"Wilson, "The Aftermath of Mencken," p. 107.
4
Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, xxxvi.
Aside from having a part in welcoming the new and ex-
perimental from abroad, Mencken championed such American
writers as Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and Willa Cather when their realism was not to the taste of
the professors and the genteel literary journals. He was
friend and mentor to Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and was
Dreiser's defender and champion during the decades in which
that author was regarded by academia as a barbarian. It was
Mencken who organized the famous Dreiser protest when the
"book-baiters," to use his phrase, set upon The Genius. By
the mid-twenties, he was our best known social and literary
critic, and despite his raucous voice and indubitably bad
manners in debate, he had earned the respect of many of his
peers. Walter Lippmann called him "the most powerful per-
sonal influence on this whole generation of educated people,"
and The New York Times said that he was "the most powerful
,5
private citizen in America.""
%
Despite the continuing public interest in Mencken and

the historians' recognition of him as a major figure in the
literary battles that predated the First World War and con-
tinued to the advent of the Depression, he is ordinarily not
considered a literary critic by his successors, but merely a
reviewer who did not judge by any system of standards and
was even deficient in the good taste so necessary in a critic.
5
' Ibid. , p. x n .
For instance, Stanley Hyman wrote that "his [Mencken's] dog-
matic evaluations seem almost always the product of simple
ignorance."^ Van Wyck Brooks contended that "it was evident
7
that he had the vaguest of literary standards," while
Edmund Wilson, one of Mencken's early admirers, character-
ized Mencken as a reviewer critic " . . . who tended to use
book-reviewing as a way of putting over his own personality
8
and his opinions on all sorts of subjects." Louis Kronen-
berger said that while Mencken was "a very good pamphleteer,
g
he turned out to be a very bad critic."
Within the last five or six years this prevalent view
of Mencken's literary criticism has been challenged by
William H. Nolte in his H. L. Mencken: Literary Critic and
his H. L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, and to a lesser
extent by Carl R. Dolmetsch in his article "H. L. Mencken as
a Critic of Poetry," which appeared in a German journal.^
In his summation of Mencken's criticism, Nolte asserts that
%
he possessed the two necessary requirements of a good critic:
^Stanley E. Hyman, The Armed Vision (New York, 1947) ,

p. 63.
7
Dorothy Nyren, editor, A Library of Literary Criticism
(New York, 1.960) , p. 323.
8
Edmund Wilson, "The Literary Worker's Polonius,"
Atlantic Monthly, CLV (June, 1935), 679.
9
Malcolm Cowley, editor, After the Genteel Tradition
(Carbondale, Illinois, 1936), p. 89.
10
Carl R. Dolmetsch, "H. L. Mencken as a Critic of
Poetry," Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien, XI (1966), 83-95.
sound judgment and a discernible influence on readers and
writers. Nolte maintains that "with rare exceptions . . .
the writers he praised have lived and the writers he con-
demned have died . . . " and asserts that "his popularity
among writers was larger than that enjoyed by any other
American critic before or s i n c e . A study of Mencken's
critical pieces in his A Book of Prefaces, his Prejudices
series, and other of his books and Mercury articles, and of
the pieces selected by Nolte in his H. L. Mencken's Smart
Set Criticism has prompted me to affirm the contention that
Mencken has been notably underrated as a critic.
It is the thesis of this paper that Mencken's major
literary judgments have stood up well in the light of current
taste. In 1900 he asserted that Huckleberry Finn was the
"greatest novel yet produced by an American writer": ten
years passed before William Lyon Phelps had the nerve or good
1"?
fortune to make a similar claim for Twain. Mencken praised
Conrad and Dreiser when praise for them was not the fashion,
and his evaluation of other contemporary writers was usually
accurate. Mencken missed badly on a few of the new writers
who are now considered major figures, but these failures were
not due to an erratic judgment but to a more genteel and
"^William H. Nolte, Mencken: Literary Critic (Middle-
town, 1964), p. 259.
12
Isaac Goldberg, The Man Mencken (New York, 1925) ,
p. 104; Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. 176.
conservative sensibility than is usually ascribed to him.
While his criticism may be described as impressionistic—a
term to which he did not strenuously object—it was based
on a well developed philosophy of man and the universe. The
tone of casualness which chracterized his reviews usually
obscured the criteria by which he judged literature. Conse-
quently, the consistency with which he applied his criteria
has generally been overlooked. However, when one becomes
aware of these standards—the specification of which he
usually reserved for discussion of his favored authors—then
his consistency becomes more readily apparent.
This thesis will be developed in more detail in the

succeeding chapters. For a fuller understanding of Mencken
as a critic, the situation of American letters at the begin-
ning of his critical activities will be presented along with
some particulars of his background and career. However, in
keeping with the main intent of this thesis, the major
*
emphasis will be placed on three areas of his criticism,

fiction, drama, and poetry, with a chapter covering each
activity.
CHAPTER II
THE CRITICAL CLIMATE
The year 1910 began the first full decade of widespread

revolt that overthrew what has been called the genteel tradi-
tion of American literature. During the first ten years of
the new century most of the new generation of critics had
begun making their appearance, all dissatisfied with various
aspects of the climate of domestic letters and searching for
ways to improve it. Although our most influential literary
figure, William Dean Howells, had aided such early American
naturalists as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Hamlin
Garland before the turn of the century and had himself
written novels which helped pioneer realism in this country,
his conception of the term was either too fastidious or too
lenient for the newcomers. Nevertheless, when Mencken began
his uninhibited comment on the state of domestic literature
from the Smart Set in 1908, Howells' image of the bounds of
taste: was almost universally accepted by the literary estab-
lishment. The proper subject of the novelist was generally
agreed to be that of an Anglo-Saxon, protestant people, living
a rural or small-town life of grace and homely virtues,
"^Cowley, After the Genteel Tradition, p. 5.

similar in its essentials to what their forefathers were
supposed to have led. With the rapid urbanization that
accompanied America's increase in population creating a new

sophistication, it was inevitable that literature would have
to change to reflect the changing face of the country.
The battle lines were not clearly drawn; it was not
necessarily a clear-cut dispute between critics and the
2
authors, with the reader a bystander. The struggle had
been precipitated by Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, whose novels
were a distinct embarrassment to the established dilettantes,
academicians, and publishers who were generally satisfied to
follow Howells' cautious lead. At about the same .time
William Cary Brownell ushered in the first substantial group
of professional critics in America—the humanists—who, while
approving of the accent on the moral tone of literature,
wanted to upgrade literary standards by the tenets of critics
such as Matthew Arnold and Sainte-Beuve. The humanistic
•
critics saw the growth of .naturalism in America as evidence

of a pressing need for the development of a responsible
group of native critics to counter such trends.
Two critics of those days, however, one a professor and
the other primarily a newspaper writer, scorned the lack of
2
Bernard Smith, Forces in American Criticism (New York,
1939), p. 342.
3
Robert E. Spiller and others, Literary History of the
United States (New York, 1960), p. 1136.
10
spontaneity of the humanistic approach. Lewis Gates and

James Huneker believed that the writer should not only not
distrust his own artistic perception but should present it
in a way that would communicate the immediacy of that per-
4
ception. They felt that this same perception of what an
artist intended to portray—impressionism in other words-
would bring " . . . critics back to an intimate sense of
5
art." However, by their reliance on feeling rather than
specific rules of judgment, impressionists were too much the
individualists to ally themselves in cliques or schools.
Where Huneker was a practicing critic, Gates was more the
evangelist. Huneker provided a refreshing voice in news-
papers by describing the personalities and art of the Euro-
pean modernists to the American reader with a gusto that
contrasted sharply with the moralistic bent and didacticism
of the more typical American critics. Gates, on the other
hand, was more concerned with reconciling impressionism
•
with academic criticism.^
Despite his didactic approach Brownell was not a pro-
fessor, but he could claim the distinction of having been
one of the founders of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters and a long-time consultant with Scribner's. Like
Huneker he turned instinctively to Europe for examples of
4 5
Ibid., p. 1078. Ibid., p. 1367.
6
Ibid., p. 1078.
11
good literature; but where Huneker accepted writers without

regard to their morals or background, Brownell deliberately
looked for cultured, disciplined writers he could cite for
Americans to follow. His French Traits (1889) and French
Art (1892) began this search, and were followed by Victorian
Prose Masters (1901) and American Prose Masters (1909). His
principal archetype, arrived at by a process of elimination,
was Matthew Arnold. Brownell accepted Arnold's belief that
the regulation of an author's work as well as his personal
behavior should evolve from the conscious exercise of reason.
Two of his later books, Criticism (1914) and Standards
(1917), contend that well-trained and applied reason is the
only basis for judging any art, not an instinctive apprecia-
tion nor the blind use of arbitrary rules. Reflecting his
predilection for critical theory, he said that "the cause
of letters, the cause of art, is not that of its practi-
tioners—hardly that of its practice—but of its constituting
7 *
standards." Standards, whether individual or evolved, were
of course close to the heart of the literary house-cleaning
Brownell wished to initiate, but he failed to make clear
what constituted them.
James Huneker did not fit easily into any of the Ameri-
can groups of critics. Although he was an impressionist by
temperament and practice, he seemed content merely to point
7
H. L. Mencken, editor, A New Dictionary of Quotations
on Historical Principles (New York, 1942), p. 1143.
12
out in entertaining prose the European literature, music,

and art that he considered beautiful or stimulating rather
than engage actively in the critical controversy over Ameri-
can culture. Huneker stuck almost exclusively to European
artists simply because he saw little in American culture
that he considered worth commenting on aside from bemoaning

8
its insularity. Mencken's admiration of Huneker's graceful
iconoclasm was somewhat akin to his attraction to George
Jean Nathan. Both Nathan and Huneker were aesthetes and
hedonists, catholic in their cultural interests, but politi-
cally naive; their appeal to the young intellectuals was in
part due to their hospitality to new literature and art
which was either ignored or damned by the humanists. True
to his impressionism, Huneker attempted no formulation of
rules on criticism, but pioneered criticism intended more
for entertainment than instruction. Mencken credited him
9
with having routed the genteel critics of the nineties.
Lewis E. Gates was a Harvard professor on the other
side of the ideological fence from his colleague, Irving
Babbitt; his philosophy was reflected in his students Joel
Spingarn and Frank Norris (the latter dedicated McTeague to
him), as well as in his own work. In his essay "Impressionism
8s
Charles I. Glicksberg, American Literary Criticism,
1900-1950 (New York, 1952), p. 62.
9
H. L. Mencken, H. L. Mencken: The American Scene,
edited by Huntington Cairns (New York, 1965), p. 417.
13
and Appreciation" (1899), Gates pioneered the attempt to

reconcile impressionism with criticism in America, saying
"his [the critic's] aim is primarily not to explain and not
to judge or dogmatize, but to enjoy: to realize the manifold
charm the work of art has gathered into itself from all
sources, and to interpret this charm imaginatively to the
men of his own day and g e n e r a t i o n . H e preferred to call
his criticism "appreciation" to try to preclude accusations
of being an advocate of non-discriminatory criticism associ-
ated with impressionism.
Irving Babbitt took up the call voiced by Browne11 and

elaborated on it vigorously and persistently for some twenty-
five years. Babbitt, a Harvard professor of French litera-
ture, held humanistic ideas similar to Brownell's but he was
*
less inclined to believe that American literature contained

signs of developing self-discipline or a respectable tradi-
tion.^ Beginning with Literature and the American College
•
(1908) he traced literary trends through a series of six

closely-related books, each seeking to illustrate particular
fallacies of thought and concluded that man must return to
a philosophy epitomized by the Greek philosophers and the
humanists of the Renaissance. Man, to him, must exercise
his God-given will to keep his naturalistic makeup under
^Smith, Forces in American Criticism, p. 277.

^Glicksberg, American Literary Criticism, p. 111.
14
control while developing his uniquely huraan qualities which

set him apart from both God and nature. Babbitt accused
science of luring man into an exaggerated kinship with nature
12
that subverted his individuality in God's scheme of things;
man's individuality could be realized only by an awareness
of his intellectual past and the need to assert the power of
reason over emotion. Naturalism in literature, to him,
merely viewed man as an integral part of nature and did not
account for man's sense of ethics or superior intellect;
hence it could not help but portray degeneracy. Criticism,
in Babbitt's eyes, must educate and uplift literature to
conform to man's legitimate aspirations or it would be
derelict in its primary function. Babbitt quite naturally
took issue with what he thought was Mencken's desire to
simplify critical standards to a matter of liking or dis-
liking a work of art, and did not hesitate to deride this
13
point of view before his students or in print. Apparently
he was either unaware of or skeptical of the sincerity of
Mencken's statement: "it [art] has its social, its political,
14
even its moral implications."
12
Smith, Forces in American Criticism, p. 342.
13
Albert Van Nostrand, editor, Literary Criticism in
America (New York, 1957), p. 255.
14
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series (New York,
1919), p. 18.
15
Another subscriber to Brownell's philosophy was Paul

Elmer More. A Harvard classmate of Babbitt, he was influ-
enced in his critical beliefs by Babbitt while at school;
after graduation he became an editor of the New York Evening
Post and The Nation in succession and finally established his
residence at Princeton. A quiet, contemplative man, he pre-
ferred to expound his personal philosophy in his extensive
series of Shelburne Essays, which he began in 1901 and con-
tinued up to 1933. He made a lifelong study of religion and
man, describing their relationship and expounding his con-

15
ception of man's moral responsibilities. To More, man must
find his own proper position between religion and temporal
concerns, reaching a balance that would preclude any identi-
fication with naturalism. More's humanism closely resembled
that of Babbitt, with whom he retained a friendship and
collaboration after leaving college. However, he combined
his criticism with an even greater emphasis on the moralistic
conception of the function of literature than did Babbitt.
Ironically More shared an admiration for the great man with
Mencken and, like Mencken, wrote a book on Nietzsche; but
his conception of a truly great man required that he have an
exemplary background and the necessary awareness of the im-
portance of the moral element in his work.
15
16
Stuart P. Sherman was a critic who shifted his own

ideological leanings more than once during his career, but
when he espoused a particular philosophy he defended it
vigorously. He was influenced by Professor Babbitt while a
student at Harvard and read More1s work as a consequence.
Sherman's first book, Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him (1917),
on Arnold's humanist characteristics, and his On Contemporary
Literature (1917), which derided current naturalistic trends,
16
were his principal humanist works. At the entry of America
in the First World War, Mencken infuriated Sherman by his
pro-German statements and his disavowal of any viable Ameri-
can culture, provoking both a vehement defense of native
tradition and attacks on German-American authors including
17
Dreiser. After the war Sherman became one of the profes-
sors who deserted the campus for a more public platform,
leaving the University of Illinois to take over as editor of
the New York Herald Tribune book section in 1924.. Despite
" ^
his earlier humanistic views, Sherman was eventually attracted f
to naturalistic authors such as Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis,

and began calling for an amalgamation of the two opposing
philosophies; his Critical Woodcuts (1926) reflected this
change. This drastic modification of his previous stand was
not enough to persuade Mencken to forgive his earlier
16
Ibid., p. 337.
17
Stuart P. Sherman, "Beautifying American Literature,"
The Nation, CV (November 29, 1917), 593.
17
animosity, nor did it sit well with Babbitt and More.

Sherman's untimely death in 1926 makes it difficult to assess
the true direction or full extent of his conversion.
Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Mencken, who made
their appearance near the end of the first decade of the new
century, became the leaders of the critics dedicated to the
proposition that naturalism should be accorded respectability.
One description depicts these new champions thus:
They were drawn together in common protest
against their elders rather than by a common
aesthetic philosophy. To these young men the
differences between the idealists and the humanists
were not so significant as the similarities in
their traditionalism and in their refusal to
accept the inductive methods of thinking developed
by modern science. The literary radicals demanded
a complete and open-minded restudy of the whole
relationship between literature and American life,
past and present. In the excitement of the attack
they did not take time to formulate their under-
lying principles or to assure the accuracy of
their statements. They merely threw in their
lot with the swelling current of naturalism in
fiction, poetry, and drama; and they denounced
all of the accepted American tradition as false
because they found parts of vt s t u l t i f y i n g .
The American tradition, as they saw it, was the linger-

ing modification of the Puritan ethic kept alive long after
it should have disappeared, and the literature that followed
its guidelines was as unrealistic and didactic as its under-
lying philosophy. On the whole, however, these newcomers
were not as apt to see the recent past as having been as
barren of good literature as were the humanists. Generally,
18
Spiller, Literary History of the United States, p. 1135.
18
Bourne, Brooks, and Mencken were intent on assuring the

freedom of American literature to reflect the course of
American life while the humanists were concerned with in-
fluencing the quality of future literature.
Although Randolph Bourne was the acknowledged prophet
of the literary radicals, his writings were not as extensive
as his influence would indicate. Youth and Life (1913), a
collection of his essays, proclaimed his intention to be a
radical and stated that he would use irony as the means to
emphasize his contentions. Later he wrote essays for the
Seven Arts magazine which were collected into Untimely Papers
(1919), and Van Wyck Brooks compiled more of his papers
posthumously in The History of a Literary Radical (1920).
As a student, Bourne had criticized his elders for holding
values whose primary purpose was to perpetuate the social

19
hierarchy. Twain, Thoreau, and Whitman were his American
ideals—to him they were men who had the moral independence
*
to struggle against the current mistaken depiction of life.

>
However, Bourne did not offer any concrete alternatives to

the system of values he would overthrow, and thereby left
20
himself open to the charge of advocating literary anarchy.
Van Wyck Brooks, who had known Bourne and had collabo-
rated with him until his early death, carried on as a major
19
20
Ibid., p. 367.
19
spokesman of the movement. Brooks's Wine of the Puritans

(1908) explored the anti-intellectualism of the Puritan
morality which silenced any divergence from its conception
21
of right and wrong. " He conceded that while the Puritan
dogma was useful in its time for freeing the mind for
immediate practical matters, it had become repressive under
more civilized conditions. In America's Coming of Age (1915)
he describes the evolution of the Puritan censorship into
what he called "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" judgment of litera-
22
ture. To Brooks any writing not meeting the arbitrary

standards of the genteel establishment had not been considered
worthy of intelligent, discriminating readers, or meriting
any critical treatment but condemnation. He interpreted
the struggle of the authors against this all-pervading
censorship in psychological terms, charging that they had to
make painful concessions of some sort or other in order to
gain and hold a public. In his book The Ordeal of Mark
Twain (1920) Brooks depicted Twain as a victim of these moral
and philosophical restrictions who was forced to lapse into
a caricature of the Mississippi river frontiersman rather
23
than voice his deep skepticism. He characterized Howells'
influence over Twain as an example of an insidious censorship
21
Van Nostrand, Literary. Criticism in America, p. xvi.
22
Spiller, Literary History of the United States, p. 1139
23
Walter Sutton, Modern American Criticism (Englewood
Cliffs, 1963) , p. 15.
20
posing as helpful advice. Moving on to an example of

physical escape to find freedom of expression, Brooks cited
Henry James" flight to Europe in his next book The Pilgrimage
of Henry James (1925). Finally, in Emerson and Others (1927)
he suggested that Emerson had found an alternative to flight
or retreat in the form of a personally imposed idealism.

Ironically, Brooks, who was one of the earliest proponents
of naturalism, eventually subscribed to a modified idealist's
creed. But his Ordeal of Mark Twain and Pilgrimage of Henry
James had struck powerful blows for literary freedom before
24
he began to reinterpret his philosophy. Neither Bourne
nor Brooks had specifically denied the need for morality;
what they had objected to was the repressive effect that the
imposition of an arbitrary morality and an invalid tradition
had on society and letters. They concluded that any attempt
to impose rules in place of the Puritan ethic would be
equally repressive. What remained then was the tracing of
*
a more realistic past and the establishment of the freedom

under which literature could reflect the changing present.
Bourne and Brooks gathered an enthusiastic following
that was convinced, as they were, of the obsolescence of the
old criteria of literary guidance. The movement's recogni-
tion of the growing gulf separating criticism and literature
initially went no further than demands for freedom. In
24
Cowley, After the Genteel Tradition, p. 66.
21
accordance with his philosophy, Bourne had not recognized

any need for an alliance with the aims of the new authors.
On the other hand, Brooks eventually maintained that he had
never actually questioned the need for a workable ideality,
but the rebellion had run its course by the time he made
25
this statement.
If tradition were to be repudiated as a practical basis
for the establishment of literary standards and if there
were to be any guidance in its place, other men than Bourne,
Brooks, or their followers would have to formulate it. What
the new radicals were concerned with was the discreditation
of the restrictive rules and their proponents, not the
assumption of guidance themselves. Other radicals, like
Matthew Josephson and Ludwig Lewisohn, agreed with the psy-
chological explanation of the estrangement that Brooks ex-
pounded, but they carried the search off into the realm of
Freudian thought. Still others, like Max Eastman, Waldo
Frank, and John Reed became influenced by Marxism and saw
26
the problem primarily as an outgrowth of social evolution.
Joel Spingarn was one of those critics opposed to the
imposition of guidelines so dear to the heart of the humanists,
He was a Harvard man who, after teaching some twelve years
at Columbia and serving in the First World War, held the
25 .
Glicksberg, American Literary Criticism, p. 27.
26
Spiller, Literary History of the United States,
pp. 1141-1142.
22
influential position of literary editor of Harcourt, Brace

and Company from its founding until 1932. As an ardent
advocate of the critical thought of Benedetto Croce, Spingarn
proclaimed that "we have done with all the old rules . . . "
and claimed that "the very conception of rules harks back to
27
an age of magic," statements not calculated to please the
humanists. Mencken gave a wary welcome to Spingarn's
philosophy, but could not agree with his contention that art
could be created without consideration of life in all its
28
ramifications. In Spingarn's eyes the raging literary

battle ignored the necessity for the understanding of ex-
pressionism, while a tendency of the humanists to equate his
critical philosophy with impressionism further complicated
his attempts to promulgate it. He maintained that Americans
were not prepared by background or inclination to exercise
what was the only legitimate function of criticism, the
29
determination of the aesthetic validity of a creative work,
•
and took as the cornerstone of his philosophy Carlyle's state-

ment, "The critic's first and foremost duty is to make plain
to himself '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
27
28
Mencken, Prejudices: First Series, pp. 18-19.
29 . . ...
Smith, Forces m American Criticism, p. 281.
23
30
it."1 Spingarn's work included The New Criticism (1911),
Creative Criticism (1917) , and A Spingarn Enchiridion (1929)
which rebutted More's contention that he merely taught
impressionism. In addition, his compilation of critical
highlights in Criticism in America; Its Function and Status
(1924) summarized the controversy from the statements of the
leading critics on both sides of the conflict.
Inasmuch as Mencken is the center of this study, it
seems logical to treat his part in the battle over realism
in greater detail than that given to his contemporaries.
Also, it seems expedient to examine at this point his
literary background and other factors which influenced the
nature of his criticism.
Mencken came to literary criticism by a different route
than that followed by most of his fellow critics. From the
beginning of his professional life until its close, he was a
practicing newspaper man. He began as a kid reporter for
*
the Baltimore Morning Herald at eighteen and at twenty-five

hg.d become its editor. Later he became associated with the
Sun papers; and during his years as editor of the Smart Set
and the American Mercury, he retained this relationship,
occasionally returning to reporting to cover special assign-
ments such as the Scopes "monkey" trial. After his retire-
ment from the Mercury, he continued in an advisory capacity
30
Glicksberg, American Literary Criticism, p. 82.
24
with the Sun papers and, until his incapacitating stroke in

1948, did frequent political writing and covered the national
conventions of the major political parties.
Also unlike most of his fellow critics, he was not uni-
versity trained. His formal education ceased at fifteen
with his graduation from the Polytechnic High School, where
he stood at the head of his class. Despite his failure to
continue in school, at eighteen he had read vastly more than
most college graduates. His infatuation with books had begun
early. By his own account, he was "a steady and heavy reader"
by the time he was eight. "Before he was twelve he had
plowed at home and abroad through a mass of miscellaneous
reading matter, including the novels of Dickens, Chamber's
Encyclopedia, Ben Hur, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Back-

31
ward." Certainly the most exciting discovery of those
years was Huckleberry Finn. In Happy Days he speaks of its
impact on him. "I had entered a domain of new and gorgeous
wonders," he said. According to Bode,
By the time Mencken reached his teens he
•was reading systematically and meaningfully.
He discovered Thackeray and feasted on his
Victorian abundance, finding him nearly as rich
as Dickens. From the Victorians he worked back
to the great British writers of the eighteenth
century, Addison, Steele, Pope, and Samuel
Johnson among them. He went back further still
to the Renaissance and Shakespeare, and there-
after to Chaucer, whose racier tales delighted
him. By the time he was fifteen he had read
. the whole canon of English classics and had
^Carl Bode, Mencken (Carbondale, 1969), p. 22.

25
seasoned them with selections from minor works.

Though few authors, major or minor, daunted him
he found it impossible to read Milton's Paradise
Lost as well as most of the works by Edmund
Spenser.32
Kipling was his favorite among the modern English writers.

William Dean Howells, Frank Stockton, Henry James, Stephen
Crane, and Richard Harding Davis were among the Americans
whom he enjoyed. For his biographer Goldberg, Mencken summed
up his reading somewhat expansively, "Altogether, I doubt
that any human being in this world has ever read more than
33
I did between my twelfth and eighteenth years." Among the
discoveries of his teens were James Huneker and Thomas Henry
Huxley. Huneker's criticism was to prove a continuing source
of delight to Mencken, and Huxley not only provided him with
a prose model but was a major formative influence upon his
thought. The reading of Huxley led him to Herbert Spencer
and to such of their contemporaries as Henry Thomas Buckle
34
and James Anthony Froude. In his late teens or early
twenties he became acquainted with the writings of Ibsen,
Shaw, and Nietzsche.
If reading and writing are not only the basis of an
education but its major constituents, Mencken got something
better than a university education. In addition to the
variety of experience that he had with the Heraid--reporting,
32 33
Ibid. Ibid., pp. 22-23.
34
Ibid., p. 79.
26
editing, criticizing plays, writing his own columns—he

wrote and published poems and short stories in a variety of
magazines. The short stories that he wrote for Frank
Leslie's Popular Monthly brought him an offer from Ellery
Sedgwick, its editor, to join the staff of that magazine.
Huxley, Shaw, and Nietzsche were major influences in

shaping the young Mencken, or perhaps one should say that
their ideas and attitudes were particularly congenial to him.
Huxley, in particular, was an inspiration. As Mencken said
of him, years after the initial acquaintance with his
writing,
All his life long he flung himself upon
authority—when it was stupid, ignorant and
tyrannical. He attacked it with every weapon
in his rich arsenal—wit, scorn, and above all•
superior knowledge. To it he opposed a single
thing: the truth as it could be discovered and-
established—the plain truth that sets men free.
"When that rich arsenal was directed at religion, it had a
powerful effect on Mencken," says Bode. "He [Mencken] said
explicitly, 'Huxley gave order and coherence to my own doubts

35
and converted me into a violent agnostic.'"
At twenty-five he published his first book—George
Bernard Shaw: His Plays, which incidentally was the first
book to be published on Shaw. His exposition of Nietzsche,
which came out three years later, was the first American
treatment of that philosopher. Although Mencken later became
35
Ibid., p. 79.
27
strongly critical of Shaw, he admitted that he and Shaw

36
"worked the same side of the street." Obviously they
shared a common iconoclasm and the ability to attract
readers through breaches of decorum. Mencken's study of
Nietzsche confirmed his admiration for the superior man and
his conviction that ethics were far from immutable.
Mencken's study of Nietzsche was a continuing one. In
addition to his Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), he
translated and edited The Antichrist (1920) and wrote other
expositions of his philosophy. His initial study of Shaw
led him to wide reading in the contemporary dramatists and
to editing two of Ibsen's plays, Little Eyolf and A Doll's
House.
By the time Mencken had begun his career in the Smart
Set, his prose style was crystallized and his philosophy
formed. His subject was at hand—the American scene, our
national life. His procedure was a slashing attack on almost
every group and region of the United States. As Morison
says,
He lashed out at almost every group in Ameri-
can society—the "booboisie," the "anthropoids" of
the Alleghenies; the Gelehrten ("as pathetic an
ass as a university professor of history"), the
politicians ("crooks and charlatans"), evangelists
("gaudy zanies"), orators ("the seemly bosh of the
late Woodrow"), parsons and priests ("mountebanks"),
and guardians of public morals ("wowsers").
36
Nolte, Mencken: Literary Critic, p. 29.
28
Morison continues: "Mencken was no social reformer but a

saucy iconoclast who had something amusing to sav about
every region, class, and profession in America. He despised
democracy and freely predicted that it would dissolve into
37
despotism; he discerned very little good in American life."
Yet the verve of his attack, his joyous exaggerations, and
the splendor of his invective brought pleasure to many who
did not share his opinions.
His dominant theme was the puritanism of American life.
He found it in almost every aspect of our past and present.
It had deprived our people of any esprit, of any sense of the
joy of life, said Mencken. It had inhibited our writers.
Its worst manifestation was the "Blue Nose," the professional
reformer. In his essay "Puritanism as a Literary Force,"
he not only cited the effects of puritanism on our litera-
ture and national life but detailed the activities of the
Watch and Ward societies, the Comstocks, and the Sumners.
Many American authors and publishers knew from bitter experi-
ence that the force he described was real and dangerous.
Quasi official censorship existed in Boston, New York, and
other parts of the country. As a rule the reformers had the
government attorneys and the courts on their side and could
count on the cooperation of some publishers. In his busy
life, Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the
37
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the Ameri-
can People (New York, 1965), p. 910.
29
Suppression of Vice, had hailed several thousand individuals

into court and "caused the destruction of tons of books,
some of which were simply pornography but others of which
38
represented serious literature."
Mencken's friend and protege, Dreiser, became the
favorite target of Comstock's successor, Sumner. Dreiser's
first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), had been brought forth
reluctantly by its publisher who had anticipated correctly
the reaction of the public. American readers did not approve
of a novel in which the heroine lived in common-law marriage
with two men and yet at the end of the novel was shown as
having reached the pinnacle of fame as an actress. These
readers were accustomed to seeing vice punished in the novel
and here it appeared to be rewarded. By 1916 Dreiser's
truculence, the progress of his fiction in the years that
had intervened since Sister Carrie, and even the fact that
he had a German name had done nothing to incline the public
in his favor. There was no public outcry against the
>
governmental action, taken at Sumner's instigation, of

banning Dreiser's The Genius from the mails as immoral. How-
ever, Mencken's deepest feelings were aroused. He had been
among the first to recognize the merits of Sister Carrie,
and a friendship had developed between the two men with
Mencken in the role of mentor and critic. Mencken had
38
Bode, Mencken, pp. 101-102.
30
steadily pressed Dreiser's claim to greatness and had pro-

claimed his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), as the
best American novel since Huckleberry Finn. Although
Mencken's German antecedents and sympathies had rendered
him also suspect, he was successful in enlisting the support
of the Author's League and in seeing the ban lifted.
Mencken's severest bout with the New Humanists was also due
in part to his championing of Dreiser. Mencken continued to
battle censorship. His part in the Scopes trial (1925) was
more than that of a reporter; it was Mencken who interested
Clarence Darrow in taking up the defense of Scopes. In
1927, in the celebrated "Hat Rack" case Mencken invited
arrest in a further test of the censorship laws.
The importance of Mencken's role in the artist's battle

for freedom of expression has been commonly conceded, but
the usual consensus has been to deny him significance as a
critic. However, the fact remains that for roughly a quarter
of a century he commented upon most of the important works
of fiction and poetry published in this country. Nolte has
estimated that he reviewed more than two thousand books for
39
the Smart Set. , When one adds his reviews and articles in
Mercury, his book of Prefaces, and the criticism con-
tained in the six volumes of his Prejudices, the volume of
his literary criticism is considerable. Moreover, he was
39
Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. xi.
31
probably the most influential critic in this country, if one

may rely upon such opinions as those of the New York Times
and Walter Lippmann which were cited in the first chapter of
this study.
That his criticism was both extensive and influential
does not, of course, mean that it was of the first quality.
Indeed, one must recognize notable limitations in his taste
and procedures. His hard-ridden thesis that puritanism had
enervated American life and literature led him to belittle
American writing, before Mark Twain.. A summary of American
literature that dismisses Hawthorne with a phrase—"the
harsh Puritanical fables of Hawthorne"—may serve the pur-
poses of polemic, but it distorts literary history. It
should be recognized also that Mencken1s taste was limited
"i
primarily to writing in the realistic-naturalistic tradition

and that his highest praise was reserved for those writers
whose philosophy was naturalistic, as was his own. His
taste in poetry was limited, and he was ill-prepared to cope
with the innovations in poetry that came with Eliot and those
which Joyce introduced in prose fiction. Yet the burden of
this thesis is that when his work as a whole is considered
he must be pronounced more than a competent critic. Judging
a vast volume of writing as it appeared from the press, he
showed an unusual ability to recognize excellence. He suc-
ceeded in that most difficult task of the critic, the judg-
ment of his contemporaries.
32
It seems that Mencken tired of criticism before he gave

up the Mercury, but the volume of his other writings con-
tinued unabated. He had pursued other literary projects in
conjunction with his work on the Smart Set and the Mercury.
These writings included not only The Book of Prefaces (1917)
and the series of Prejudices (1919-1927) but also In Defense
of Women (1918), Heliogabalus (1920), Notes on Democracy
(1926), and Treatise on the Gods (1930). His acclaimed
American Language was first published in 1919 and appeared
in new and revised editions in 1921, 1923, 1936, 1945, and
1948. Publications after he left the Mercury included
Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934), Dictionary of Quotations
on Historical Principles (1942), A Christmas Story (1946),
h Mencken Chrestomathy (1949), and Minority Report (1956).
Perhaps the most enjoyable of these is the autobiographical
series Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941) , and Heathen
Days (1943), which appeared originally as articles in the
New Yorker. His career was brought to an end by a stroke in
y
1948, but he was to live for eight more years. To him, such
an ending to his career was a grim joke of fate and evidence
of the truth of his view of the forces which rule our lives.
CHAPTER III
MENCKEN'S CRITICISM OF FICTION
Although Mencken's most valuable service to literature

was his contribution toward the establishment of a milieu in
which authors could work without harassment, he was a better
critic than has generally been conceded. That is to say,
most of the authors who were his favorites are still recog-
nized as having been among the best of his day. Mencken
was an early advocate of Conrad and Dreiser when the former
was not yet well known in America and the latter was con-
sidered too raw to be read. Further, he saw the promise of
Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson and was the mentor of
Sinclair Lewis during Lewis' most productive years. Mencken
accepted Bennett's writing with cogent reservations and
astutely traced Wells's decline as a writer of fiction after
a favorable beginning. Finally, he had forseen Mark Twain'fa-
preeminent place in American literature long before the
academicians recognized Twain as anything more than a
comedian.
Mencken's misjudgments, on the other hand, can at least

be accounted for by his personal taste. When questioning
his high opinion of Cabell, one should recall that Cabell's
critical reputation was at its apex when Mencken praised
him, and, even now, certain critics and readers believe that
33
34
Cabell's work is unjustly slighted."*" Also, Mencken,, with

his sensitivity in regard to writing skill, could under-
standably have been appreciative of Cabell's lucid style.
As for Mencken's distaste for Joyce and Lawrence, it was in
keeping with his conservative bent, however erroneous his
judgment on these two writers may seem in retrospect.
The conservative factor in Mencken's criticism was

curiously mixed with a strong advocacy of realism, the basic
tenet of his criticism. In accordance with this philosophy,
Mencken believed that credible characterization was indis-
pensable to good fiction so the reader could feel a kindred
sense of involvement. He further believed that the story
could be credible while being simple and that it should
support characterization by furnishing clear reasons for the
actions of the characters. And, if realism was to be served,
the story could not omit situations that heretofore had been
considered too sordid to appear in American fiction.
Mencken maintained that the novel should convey the

sense of the impersonality of life and its capricious work-
ings on the fate of man. However, this impression should be
implied by the situation of the story, not by any direct
advocacy. He also saw any moralizing in the novel as
entirely alien to his conviction that fiction is an art
rather than an attempt to teach anything. He believed that
"Êdmund Wilson, "The James Branch Cabell Case Reopened,"

New Yorker, XXXII (April 21, 1956), 140.
35
the art of fiction, in other words, simply involved the

attempt to portray life realistically and was not the sub-
servient means of getting any lesson across to the reader.
However, Mencken's conservatism rebelled against the use of
explicitness as an end in itself, so he held that detail
must be used with discretion—a story could be more easily
overtold than understated and the bounds of taste were still
to be considered.
The English classicists, Fielding, Thackeray, and Hardy,
were the authors Mencken most often cited as examples of how
the novel should be written, although his discussion of them
was confined to isolated comments. Mencken saw the creation
of the character of Tom Jones as the single accomplishment
of Fielding that overshadowed all of his other qualities.
His speaking of the impossibility of detaching Fielding
" . . . from his buoyant optimism, his belief in mankind, his
firm conviction that the mere being alive is sufficient for
2
happiness" was a disparaging comment, but it did not color

Mencken's admiration for his characterization of Tom Jones.
In speaking of memorable characters in literature,
Mencken said that "Rabelais created two, Fielding one,
3
Thackeray three or four and Shakespeare a roomful . . . ."
2
H. L. Mencken, "A Glance at the Spring Fiction" (April,
1910), cited in Nolte, Mencken: Literary Critic, p. 76.
3
Mencken, "Popularity Index" (June, 1910), reprinted in
Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism. It should be noted
that Nolte gives only the date of the article and does not
supply the volume number and inclusive pages in this book.
36
In addition to recognizing Thackeray's ability to draw vivid

and accurate portraits of Englishmen, Mencken linked him
with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Balzac, and Twain in their common
4
lack of lofty detachment. However, Mencken saw Thackeray
as detached from the fate of his characters, noting that
"Rabelais and Thackeray were cynics and so they saw life as
a great game of make-believe, with all of the participants
5
wearing grotesque cloaks and masques . . . ." This philosophy
approached Mencken's acid view of life and thus was probably
Thackeray's chief attraction to him.
Possibly Thomas Hardy's philosophy of life was even
closer to Mencken's beliefs than was Thackeray's. In any
case, Hardy was frequently cited by Mencken as being a
pessimistic realist of great power. Mencken saw Hardy's
philosophy as being founded on a realization of the hopeless
tragedy of life and was moved by his stark portrayal of man's
futile struggle against an unknown adversary. Mencken re-
ferred to the Comstocks' suppression of Hardy's Jude the
Obscure near the turn of the century, viewing their.action
as one more reason for the necessity of their overthrow.^
4
Mencken, "Final Estimate" (October, 1919), reprinted
in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. 185.
^Mencken, "A Hot Weather Novelist" (August, 1910),
cited in Nolte, Mencken: Literary Critic, p. 47.
6
H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (New York, 1917),
p. 260.
37
And, in a swipe at the humanists, Mencken asserted that Paul

7
Elmer More acted as if he had never heard of Hardy.

Such realists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Dickens
obviously did not conform to Mencken's particular criteria
of realism. Mencken, for instance, seldom mentioned Jane
Austen in his critical pieces; but, when he did, his comment
was similar to his linking of her with Washington Irving and
Hannah More, all three being accused of "making pretty waxen
groups" and of being "toilsome, fastidious and self-conscious
g
craftsmen." Nolte believes that Austen's honesty should
9
have qualified her as a realist in Mencken's eyes, but

Mencken evidently saw no need to point out that honesty.
Mencken was silent on George Eliot, but it can be assumed
that he did not deem her moralizing worthy of comment. On
the other hand, Mencken cited Dickens as a prime example of
the Victorian optimist and moralist. Typical was his asser-
tion that Dickens had a ". . . sentimental view of the world,
with its cardinal doctrine that all human ills are to be
cujred by love."^ Mencken had no patience with such a
philosophy. However, what he saw in America and England in
his own time gave evidence of a continuance of the healthy
7
s
8
Mencken, Prejudices: First Series, p. 58.
9
"^Mencken, "A Glance at the Spring Fiction" (April,
1910), cited in Nolte, Mencken: Literary Critic, p. 76.
38
literary tradition established by Fielding, Thackeray, and

Hardy.
Mencken saw few qualities in the writing of the classi-
cal American writers, Hawthorne, Poe, Howells, and James to
recommend or try to perpetuate. Twain, not yet seriously
considered in their company, was the only nineteenth-century
American author whose fiction he respected. The names of
Hawthorne, Poe, and James were usually brought up by Mencken
to emphasize their particular reactions to American Philis-
tinism in their time, so he commented only incidentally on
their literary characteristics. Very briefly, Mencken saw
Poe as a writer of ordinary short stories (he admired him
chiefly for his audacious literary criticism), Hawthorne as
a sort of hermit concerned with psychological problems, and
James as "a sort of super-Howells, albeit a superb techni-
cian."^''' Howells, to Mencken, was the last surviving pur-
veyor of the genteel tradition and therefore was an ideologi-
cal enemy. Although Mencken acknowledged Howells' early but
qualified encouragement of such men as Crane and Norris, he
considered him too shackled by his innate squeamishness; and
Mencken, like Brooks, waxed scornful of his influence on
Twain.
"^Mencken, "Our Literary Centers" (November, 19 20), re-

printed in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, pp. 13-14.
39
As a young newspaper man of twenty, Mencken had praised

12
Huckleberry Finn as being the finest American novel. Ten
years later, William Lyon Phelps ventured to give the book
what was, in Mencken's words, "the first honest and hearty
praise . . . by a college professor in good standing, that
these eyes had ever encountered. . . . " While commenting
cynically on the time it took for this evaluation to be made
in America, Mencken pointed out the fact that the English
had publicly recognized Twain's genius in the early nineties
and that other Americans were belatedly beginning to follow
13
their lead by the time of Twain's death in 1910. Repeated-
ly, Mencken proclaimed his belief that Huckleberry Finn was
one of the great literary masterpieces of the world. And he
assigned Twain a singular historical position, asserting
that he was the first native artist to project the American
point of view. While Mencken noted that Twain had grave
deficiencies in his aesthetic background, he asserted that
Twain's close association with provincial American life was
r
unique among native authors and the basis for the authenticity
of his art.^ In articles on Twain and in numerous refer-
ences to him, Mencken noted his clear style of writing, his
12
Goldberg, The Man Mencken, p. 104.
13
Mencken, "Popularity Index" (June, 1910), reprinted
in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, pp. 176-177.
"^Mencken, "Final Estimate" (October, 1919), reprinted
40
talent at characterization, his cynical view of life, and

his compassionate view of man, as well as the fact that
Twain had been misjudged by his contemporaries.
Whenever he considered Twain's prose, Mencken revealed
his admiration for his untaught style with its power and
simplicity. In a short piece entitled "Twain and Howells,"
Mencken compared the greatly contrasting styles of the two
men, stating that "the one wrote English as Michelangelo
hacked marble, broadly, brutally, magnificently; the other
15
was a maker of pretty waxen groups." Later, again to
emphasize Twain's preeminence in prose, Mencken credited
Twain with having written . cleaner, straighter, vivider,
16
saner English, than either Irving or Hawthorne."
The skepticism of Twain during a time when such views
were still frowned upon in America was something that could
not fail to excite Mencken's interest. However, he did not
admire Twain's intellectual timorousness in not proclaiming
17
his beliefs more openly. Still he marveled at Twain's
sharp eye " . . . for the bogus, in religion, politics, art,
literature, patriotism, virtue!" and said that the more
Twain looked at life the more it seemed to be meaningless.
"^Mencken, "Twain and Howells" (January, 1911), re-
printed in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. 178.
1 fi
Mencken, "Our One Authentic Giant" (February, 1913) ,
reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. 179.
17
Mencken, "Final Estimate" (October, 1919), reprinted
41
As for Twain's sympathetic view of mankind, Mencken said

that he had seen man as ". . . humbugs, but as humbugs to be
18
dealt with gently. . . . " And, stressing the uniqueness
of his portrayal of Huckleberry Finn, Mencken asserted that
nothing comparable to him could be found in Hawthorne, Poe,
19
Cooper, or Holmes.
When Mencken discussed contemporary British authors, he
focused his attention on the writers whose talents he appre-
ciated. Consequently, Conrad, Bennett, Wells, and Moore
got precedence over Joyce and Lawrence in his criticism. It
is difficult to read either chauvinism or Anglomania into
any of Mencken's work; he simply wrote what he thought, not
hesitating to change his opinions when he saw changes in the
work of any author. Whereas'he gave a strictly qualified
approval to Bennett's works, noting their relative uniformity
of quality as they came out, he praised Wells' early novels
highly, then as he thought Wells had changed, began to
criticize him unmercifully. His comments on George Moore,
while briefer than those on Wells and Bennett, were uniformly
approving. Conrad stood in a class by himself in Mencken's
eyes and he treated him accordingly.
18
Mencken, "Our One Authentic Giant" (February, 1913),
19
Mencken, "Popularity Index" (June, 1910), reprinted
42
In 1912 Mencken stated that Joseph Conrad was the

20
greatest artist writing m English at that time. During
Mencken's critical career, he bestowed more unreserved
praise on Conrad than on any other author and, with the
possible exception of Dreiser, wrote more expository articles
on Conrad and made more widespread comment on him than on
any other literary personage. In the Smart Set Mencken re-
viewed all of Conrad's books appearing after 1908. Whenever
he mentioned such tales as Youth, Heart of Darkness, and
Lord Jim, he usually asserted their right to be called
classics. The fatalistic theme that pervaded all of Conrad's
novels is what attracted Mencken most, judging from his
comments, but he also praised Conrad's realistic character-
ization, his unique use of English, his irony, and his skill
at developing basically simple plots. It is difficult to
find anything in Mencken's criticism of Conrad that is in
any way disapproving.
The closest Mencken came to voicing disapproval was a
comment on Conrad's English. In a piece he wrote on Conrad
in 1912, Mencken stated that Conrad's prose reflected his
labored search for the appropriate phrase and went on to say
that his occasional clumsiness and deliberateness should be
20
Mencken, "Conrad's Self-Portrait" (January, 1912),
43
21
accepted as a concession to his greatness. Some three
years after publication of his The American Language, Mencken
changed his tune, saying that "the truly first-rate writer
is not one who uses the language as such dolts [school-
masters and their dupes] demand that it be used; he is one
22
who reworks it in spite of their prohibition." Still a
couple of years later Mencken said of Conrad, "his style is
not only not obscure: it is extraordinarily vigorous and
23
clear.
Mencken was attracted by the level of skepticism he saw
in Conrad, " . . . not complacent and attitudinizing, like
Anatole France's, nor bitter and despairing, like Thomas
Hardy's or Mark Twain's, but rather the serene skepticism of
24
the scientist. . . . " He also noted that "Joseph Conrad
is quite as unshakable an agnostic as Bennett; he is a ten
25
times more implacable ironist." This skepticism seemed
to liberate him from what Mencken called the traditional
26
point of view of the novelist.
21
Mencken, "Probing the Russian Psyche" (January, 1912),
22
Mencken, "Conrad Revisited" (December, 1922) , re-
23
H. L. Mencken, "Joseph Conrad," The Nation, CXIX
(August 20, 1924), 179.
Îbid.
25
Mencken, Prejudices: First Series, pp. 44-45.
^Mencken, "The Creed of the Novelist" (October, 1916),
44
Mencken approvingly quoted Conrad as having said, "My

task is, by the power of the printed word, to make you hear,
27
to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see."
Seizing upon Walpole's allegation that Conrad was an intri-
cate combination of realist and romanticist, Mencken agreed,
adding that the combination of both outlooks enabled a
28
writer to be truer to life's varied aspects. But later,
apparently contradicting himself, Mencken maintained that
Conrad "was a realist of the realists, for all his fondness
29
for violent passions and outlandish scenes."
The grandeur of Conrad's novels awed Mencken. He was
fully conscious of the fact that Conrad dealt with universal
tragedy in an epic manner. Mencken described Conrad's art
in superlatives.
What he sees and describes in his books is
not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's
destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devasta-
tion of universal forces, the great central drama
that is at the heart of all other dramas, the
tragic struggles of the soul of man under the
gross stupidity and obscene joking of the gods.
The depth of Conrad's tragedy in Mencken's estimation was
not the futility of his protagonists' struggles, but the
31
very fact of their challenging in the face of such odds.
27
Ibid.
28
Mencken, "Joseph Conrad," The Nation, CXIX (August 20,
1924), 179.
29
Ibid.
30
Mencken, A Book of Prefaces, pp. 63-64.
31
Ibid.
45
Bennett had some qualities in his fiction similar to

those of Conrad, and Mencken took due note of them in his
essay, "Arnold Bennett." However, Mencken felt that
Bennett's novels did not draw the reader into a sense of
involvement with any of his characters; in other words his
was a barren type of realism. Mencken cited his extreme
skepticism, aloofness, and irony, qualities he admired.
While allowing that Bennett did not commit the mistake of
trying to moralize in his books, Mencken claimed that he
never could project any feeling into his stories and was
largely an impersonal if discerning portrayer of the typical
Englishman, of large groups of people, and even whole
societies. Mencken concluded that he was hardly a novelist
in the true sense of the word, -but merely a portrayer of a
32
whole society, skillful but unconventional.
The vehemence with which Mencken criticized Wells's
decline was signified by the title of the article in which
he described Wells's career in fiction: the article was
titled "The Late Mr. Wells." Describing Wells's qualities
which he had often praised in the past, Mencken recalled that
he had imagination, fluency, humor, and an observing eye;
that he had had four good years before beginning to lose his
33
touch. His stories, according to Mencken, began to become
32
Mencken, Prejudices; First Series, pp. 36-51.
33
Ibid., p. 23.
46
unconvincing and more didactic, the excellence of his Tono

Bungay giving way to The Soul of a Bishop, "perhaps the
worst novel ever written by a serious novelist since novel-
34
writing began." Mencken summed up Wells's deterioration
by attributing it to the onset of a "messianic delusion of
. . . one of the Great Thinkers of his era . . . " and con-
cluded that "his old rival was Arnold Bennett. His new
35
rival is the Fabian Society. . . . "
George Moore fared much better in Mencken's estimation;
he mentioned his name with such authors as Hardy, Conrad,
and Zola and obviously considered him to be a peer of that
august company. Moore's talents were usually mentioned
casually in connection with some literary merit Mencken
wished to point out, but if his remarks are all taken
together, he credited Moore with solid virtues. With Hardy
and Conrad, Moore was said to have portrayed the true
36
meaninglessness and tragedy of life with insight and to
37
have viewed life as a conflict of flesh and spirit.
In contrast to his treatment of Bennett, Wells, and
Moore, Mencken never liked Lawrence's writing. Although the
Smart Set printed some of Lawrence's short stories, Mencken
34 35
Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., pp. 28-31.
Mencken, "A Modern Tragedy" (November, 1911), re-
37
Mencken, "A Hot Weather Novelist" (August, 1910),
cited in Nolte, Mencken: Literary Critic, p. 47.
47
could see no redeeming features to mention in his few

comments on him. Nolte contends that Mencken believed
Lawrence's popularity was based primarily on his constant
38
preoccupation with sex, and it is certainly easy to see
why Mencken could come to that conclusion. However, there
is evidence that points to Mencken's having based his dis-
approval as much on Lawrence's method as on his main theme.
Mencken seemed to be in character when he took Lawrence
to task for violating the oft-stated canons of his criticism.
In his review of Aaron's Rod he complained, "Now and then
they [his characters] interest me vaguely, but I never find
myself assuming that they are real. They look to me to be
simply a set of marionettes for discharging the ideas of
their creator—and the ideas of their creator . . . strike
39
me as extremely dubious." Mencken accused Lawrence of
poor characterization, moralizing, vagueness, and of pro-
pounding questionable ideas—weaknesses which Mencken did
not excuse away by virtue of Lawrence's having other com-
pensating qualities.
When another author inveighed against " . . . the erotic
primitivism of D.. H. Lawrence and the gigantic fin de si^cle
pedantries and experimentalisms of James Joyce . . . " Mencken
38
Nolte, Mencken; Literary Critic, p-. 246.
^Mencken, "Saving the World" (July, 1922), cited in
Nolte, Mencken; Literary Critic, p. 246.
48
40
agreed with him. However, Joyce seemed to have been an
author about whom Mencken uncharacteristically had difficulty
in making up his mind. Probably because of this inability
to either accept or reject Joyce unequivocally, Mencken shied
away from any extensive comment on the Irishman. The con-
servative element of Mencken's nature undoubtedly recoiled
against Joyce's experimentalism and explicit treatment of
sex, but nevertheless he seemed convinced of Joyce's artistic
integrity.
In an essay entitled "On Realism" Mencken took issue
with a review of Ulysses, which he said had praised it as
. . a complete and exact record of a day in the life of
its people." Mencken answered that the thought had come
from Joyce, not the Blooms. While further commenting that
Marion's concluding monologue was patently false, he empha-
41
sized that it was not false in Joyce's eyes. But, while
allowing for the free exercise of Joyce's imagination,
Mencken omitted any direct personal judgment on the success
of Joyce's efforts. The closest Mencken came to saying that
Joyce's concept of realism had failed was when he later
40
H. L. Mencken, "The South Astir," Virginia Quarterly
Review, II (January, 1935), 57.
41
H. L. Mencken, The Bathtub Hoax and Other Blasts and
Bravos, Robert McHugh, editor (New York, 1958) , p. 106.
49
complained that younger authors were being " . . . debauched

A O
by the experiments of such men as James Joyce. . .

The one indispensable characteristic Mencken looked for
in the British writers—realism—he also looked for among
the Americans, Dreiser, Cather, Lewis, and Anderson were
all primarily realists despite their other divergent quali-
ties; and, as such, Mencken saw in them, more than in other
native writers, evidence of the vitality of the new literary
movement in America. Consequently, he gave them advice and
encouragement as well as criticism and a chance to become
better known. In following the careers of these authors,
Mencken was more apt to note any appreciable improvement or
deviation from their realistic stance than any change in
their style.
Because of the realism and depth of Dreiser's novels
and his steadfastness in the face of assaults by the
Comstocks, Mencken saw in him the means of liberating and
giving direction to other struggling American novelists.
Mencken pictured Dreiser as a giant of American literature,
saying such unabashed things of him as, "Out of the desert
of American fictioneering, so populous and yet so dreary,
Dreiser stands u p — a phenomenon unescapably visible, but
43
disconcertingly hard to explain." But explain him Mencken
42
H, L. Mencken, "Editorial," American Mercury, XII
(September, 1927), 35.
43
Mencken, A Book of Prefaces, p. 67.
50
endeavored to do, giving him more space than he gave to any

other American author.
Mencken, although he tried, could not locate the precise

sources which shaped Dreiser's career, calling him for want
of clear influences "a great instinctive artist.1,44 He
quickly discounted the possibility of Norris' influence,
saying that Dreiser had read McTeague only after Sister
45
Carrie was completed. Mencken, probably hearkening to
his own experience, tried to equate Dreiser's reading of
Spencer and Huxley with the formation of his philosophy. In
fact, he said that Dreiser had told him of the part the two
Englishmen had played in ridding him of his Catholicism and
of quickening his curiosity about life, and Mencken added
somewhat wistfully that he wished Dreiser had also copied
46
Huxley's style.
Whenever Mencken wrote on Dreiser, he usually complained
about what he considered his greatest weaknesses, his wordi-
ness and lack of style. Dreiser's "exasperating rolling up
of irrelevant fact," as Mencken termed it, was the principal
reason for the extreme length of most of his novels, drawing
more criticism than his triteness of phrasing or lack of
47
consistent improvement m his novel-writing. Mencken
44 A^
Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 70.
46 47
Ibid., pp. 74-75. Ibid., p. 81.
51
credited some unknown editor, not Dreiser, with Sister

Carrie's brevity, commenting that The Titan and Jennie
48
Gerhardt had not been so mercifully trimmed.
Despite the length of Jennie Gerhardt, Mencken termed
it the best American novel since Huckleberry Finn. In his
comment Mencken characteristically mixed his objections and
praise.
As it stands, grim, gaunt, mirthless,
shapeless, it remains, and by long odds, the most
impressive work of art that we have yet to show
in prose fiction—a tale not unrelated in its
stark simplicity, its profound sincerity, to
Germinal and" Anna Karenina and Lord Jim—a tale
assertingly American in its scene and human ^
material, and yet so European in its method. . . .
Mencken added that Jennie Gerhardt was a "criticism and an
interpretation of life—and that.interpretation loses nothing
in validity by the fact that its burden is the doctrine that
life is meaningless, a tragedy without a moral, a joke with-
out a point. What else have Moore and Conrad and Hardy been
50
telling us all these years?"
In 1920 Mencken was still praising Jennie Gerhardt and
51
pointing out its "profound, tragic, exquisite" feeling.
Mencken had said earlier that the essence of Dreiser's work
48
Ibid., p. 82.
49
Mencken, "A Modern Tragedy" (November, 1911), re-
50T, . ,
Ibid.
51
Mencken, "De Profundis" (May, 19 20), reprinted in
Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. 258.
52
was "a matter of pure feeling" and that his "Athenian

52
tragedy" makes one forget the defects in his prose. The
book obviously supported Mencken's belief that "the aim of
a work of art is not to make one think painfully, but to
53
make one feel beautifully." Mencken's reference to think-
ing was an oblique reference to moralizing, one quality
definitely not found in Dreiser's novels.
When An American Tragedy was published in 1925, Mencken
noted no basic change in any of Dreiser's distinctive traits
despite the ten-year hiatus between this and his previous
book. Mencken said that whole chapters could be edited out,
and he noted the same old cliches and poor sentence structure.
But when Mencken turned to the climax of the novel, he felt
that it rose to the level of a genuine tragedy. He compared
the feeling of complete reality in it to the last days of
54
Hurstwood as told in Sister Carrie.
Mencken saw no falling off of Dreiser's skill at depict-
ing character in An American Tragedy. In analyzing Dreiser's
)•
approach to characterization, Mencken said that "what

interests him primarily is not what people think, but what
52
53
Mencken, "De Profundis," reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's
Smart Set Criticism, p. 258.
54
Mencken, "Dreiser in 840 Pages," American Mercury, VII
(March, 1926), 380-381.
53
55
they do." He had said that Dreiser excelled in portraying
old men whose tragic helplessness symbolized " . . . that un-
fathomable cosmic cruelty which he sees as the motive power
56
of life itself." However, Mencken had described Cowperwood
The Titan as the most real of all Dreiser's people, say-
ing that "he is accounted for in every detail, and yet, in
the end, he is not accounted for at all; there hangs about
him, to the last, that baffling mysteriousness which hangs
57
about those we know most intimately."
Shortly after Mencken began his discussion of Dreiser's
early works, a promising woman writer appeared on the scene.
Willa Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge, had caught
Mencken's alert eye on its publication in 1912. While he
noted her triteness and difficulty in characterizing a
genius, he admitted that she gave a "very good account of
58
herself indeed." From that time on, Mencken, in his re-
views of all of her books, cited her steady progress. Her
My Antonia moved Mencken to praise it as a "document in the
history of American literature" and to claim that "no
romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is
Îbid. , p. 381.
5&
Îbid. , p. 118.
58
Mencken, "Her First Novel" (December, 1912), reprinted
54
59
one-half so beautiful. . . . " Mencken was obviously
delighted not only to see a new novelist arisen in this
country, but a talented woman novelist as well.
In his essay "The Novel" Mencken launched into an ex-
planation of the historical feminine connection with this
particular branch of literature. After stating that there
were no more than two American novelists equal to Miss
Cather, he contended that women were not only "writing novels
quite as good as those written by men—setting aside, of
course, a few miraculous pieces by such fellows as Joseph
Conrad: most of them not really novels at all, but meta-
physical sonatas disguised as romances—: they are actually
surpassing men in their experimental development of the novel
60 "
form." As proof he cited My Antonia as being original in

its unique treatment of an unconventional story, this claim
being made the same year that Ulysses came out.*'"*'
The realism Miss Cather exhibited in her later novels
was, according to Mencken, achieved only after she had
abandoned the "superficial sophistication of Edith Wharton
and Henry James . . . and turned to the portrayal of ordinary
62
people." In his "Essay on Pedagogy," Mencken had asserted
that a superior novel was a character sketch of reasonably
5.9
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series (New York,
1922), pp. 210-211.
6Q 61
Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 204.
Îbid. , p. 210.
55
63
normal people; following this dictum, he chided Miss
Cather for attempting to portray a genius as the protagonist
Alexander1s Bridge. Later, Mencken would be able to
describe Miss Cather's people as being as brilliantly alive
as those of Dreiser.^
The realism that Mencken saw in Antonia was couched
in the simple story of a farm girl's quite ordinary growth
to maturity—Mencken called it sordid. He was convinced
that the sordid aspect of Antonia's life, including her
seduction, was handled with compassion rather than with
sensation in mind, saying, "Those who are intelligent enough
A
to admire M^. Antonia admire it simply because it is a very

beautiful piece of work, and not because there is anything
in it that can be distorted into support for the imbecilities
65
of Greenwich Village." He explained that "what Miss
Cather tries to reveal is the true romance that lies even
there—the grim tragedy at the heart of all that- dull, cow-
like existence—the fineness that lies deeply buried beneath
/
the peasant shell.

63
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fifth Series (New York,
1926) , p. 219.
Îbid. , p. 57 .
6S
Mencken, "Saving the World" (July, 1922) , cited in
66
Mencken, "Mainly Fiction" (March, 1919), cited in
56
Although Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis were both

realists, their approaches to the novel were diametrically
opposed. There was none of the romantic in Lewis, but
Mencken welcomed his unique talent to the American scene
with as much enthusiasm as he had that of Miss Cather. Upon
the appearance of Main Street in 1920, Mencken immediately
recognized that Lewis' concept of the typical American
middle-class couple depicted in the novel was in notable
accord with his own cynical observations. Mencken termed
the Kennicotts of Main Street "triumphs of the national
normalcy" and asserted that their divergent cultural develop-
ment was "the essential tragedy of American life, and if not
67
the tragedy, then at least the sardonic farce. . . . " To
Mencken, Lewis began to represent the fruition of his desire
to find a sort of American counterpart to Arnold Bennett—an
astute observer and portrayer of the philistinic aspects of
our society.
Two of Lewis' later novels, Babbitt and Elmer Gantry,
/
were written about types of people Mencken had suggested

68
would be good subjects for portrayals. Mencken was
delighted with Babbitt although his remark that it was
67
Mencken, "The Story of an American Family" (January,
1921), reprinted in Nolter Mencken's Smart Set Criticism,
p. 280.
68
57
69
"fiction only by a sort of courtesy" would seem to be
censorious; however, he was trying to describe the realism
Lewis had achieved in the characterization of Babbitt. Nolte
states that Elmer Gantry triggered the biggest furor in
American literary history, and, if that is true, then Mencken
must have danced with glee. As it was, he termed it
". . . a s American as goose-stepping or the mean admiration
£ mean things."
of . ,,70
Mencken found Lewis' later novels not equal to the

quality of Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry,
citing insufficient motivation for the actions of the charac-
ters as the main defect. He granted that while Lewis' later
characters still exhibited flashes of the old realism, the
earlier constancy of their portrayals was lacking. And
while still defending Lewis as a keen observer of the first
rank, Mencken's later reviews reflected his belief that
Lewis was simply not producing the quality of work he was
capable of, although he gave qualified approval to Dodsworth
and Cass Timberlane.
Mencken, despite his obvious appreciation for Lewis'
better works, believed that Lewis lacked the depth of a great
novelist. In other words, Mencken recognized that Lewis'
69
Mencken, "Portrait of an American Citizen" (October,
1922) , reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism,
p. 283.
70
Mencken, "Man of God: American Style," American
Mercury, X (April, 1927), 506.
58
novels dealt with life not as tragedy, but as a sardonic

farce. Ironically, Mencken himself looked at life much as
Lewis did, however much he believed that authors like Conrad
and Dreiser achieved more lasting art by taking their
protagonists seriously.
Mencken closely followed the work of Sherwood Anderson,
noting a lack of steady improvement somewhat similar to the
career of Lewis. But whereas he saw Lewis' shortcomings as
due to poor characterization, he believed Anderson's incon-
sistency was caused by a penchant for moralizing as v/ell as
a weakness in character motivation. However, Mencken felt
that Winesburg, Ohio possessed a quality of realism unique
in American fiction. In his review of the book Mencken
termed its insight into the inner drama of people's lives
"a new order of short story, half tale and half psychological
71
anatomizing." Although at the time Mencken exhibited less
enthusiasm for Winesburg than he was later going to show for
Main Street, he was obviously expecting further improvement
in Anderson's work.
A year later Mencken noted that Anderson's inherent
tendency to moralize, so apparent in his early books, seemed
72
to be under control in his Poor White. But three years
71
Mencken, "Something New Under the Sun" (August, 1919),
72
Mencken, "The Two Andersons" (December, 1920), re-
59
later Anderson, in his Many Marriages, discouraged Mencken

by his inability to manage the organization of a full-length
novel despite his obvious supremacy as an American short
story writer. Further, Mencken could not follow the process
of rationalization Anderson had given his protagonist and
73
therefore found an otherwise good story botched. However,
when the novel Dark Laughter was published in 1925, Mencken
said that Anderson had ". . . a t last found his method, and
achieved his first wholly satisfying book . . . " praising
its simple story, lack of speculation, and fine character-
74
ization.
Mencken's appreciation of James Branch Cabell's fiction
dated back almost as early as his appreciation for Dreiser,
despite their divergent approaches to fiction. And, although
Cabell did not rely on Mencken's counsel as much as Dreiser
and Lewis, his fame was due in large measure to Mencken's
suggestion that his short story "Some Ladies and Jurgen,"
75
first published in the Smart Set, be expanded into a book.
But before and after Jurgen, Mencken's reviews called atten-
tion to Cabell's stylish prose, iconoclastic humor, and
vivid portrayal of characters.
73
Mencken, "Muddleheaded Art" (July, 19 23), reprinted
in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, pp. 276-278.
74
Mencken, "Fiction Good and Bad,".American Mercury, VI
(November, 1925), 379.
75
Carl R. Dolmetsch, The Smart Set; A History and
Anthology (New York, 1966), p. 17.
60
When reviewing Jurgen, Mencken observed that Cabell was

"not a Deep Thinker, but a Scoffer." In this connection he
fancied that Cabell might wish to carry on in the tradition
76
of the late Ambrose Bierce. However, Mencken never com-
pared Cabell's cynicism to that of Bierce in regard to
bitterness and saw an unbridgeable gap between Cabell's
graceful prose and Bierce's clumsy but saucy mode of writing.
Still, Mencken called Cabell " . . . the most acidulous of
all the anti-romantics . . . [whose] gaudy heroes, in the
last analysis, chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers play
77
golf." Mencken realized that Cabell's characters, no
matter how realistically they were portrayed, were, like
Lewis' people, not accorded the feeling that gave the stories
of Dreiser and Conrad their tragic poignancy. Edmund Wilson
"i
called Cabell a "first class comic poet" who did not believe
78
that human destiny was tragic. Mencken would probably
have agreed with that description.
In contrast to Cabell, F. Scott Fitzgerald's utilization
of his talent was largely a source of disappointment to
Mencken. Although Mencken had encouraged Fitzgerald's
career and published ten of his short stories in the Smart
76
H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York, 1949) ,
p. 493.
77
H. L. Mencken, James Branch Cabell (New York, 1927) /
pp. 18-19.
78
Edmund Wilson, "The James Branch Cabell Case Re-
opened," New Yorker, XXXII (April 21, 1956), 154.
61
Set, he eventually grew skeptical of his ever maturing as a

first-rate novelist. In a review, however, Mencken noted
that The Great Gatsby was "a sound and laudable work" which
showed evidence of hard work and progress from his earlier
79
reliance on brilliant improvisation. As for Hemingway,
Mencken believed that "The Killers" and "Fifty Grand" were
good short stories and he praised the realism of Farewell to
81
Arms. However, in reviewing Death in the Afternoon,

Mencken noted that Hemingway's tendencies toward self-
glorification and sensationalism detracted from his writing
82
skill and realism. Mencken's withdrawal from literary
criticism ended any further comment on Hemingway's work.
The roster of authors supported by Mencken should dis-
pel any doubts as to his prescience as a critic; it oraits
few of the American novelists contemporary to Mencken now
considered among our best. As the preceding pages have
indicated, Mencken was enthusiastic about the merits of such
contemporary authors as Dreiser, Lewis, Anderson, and Cather
at a time when they were virtually unknown in America and
79
Mencken, "New Fiction," American Mercury, V (July,
1925), 382.
80
Mencken, "Fiction," American Mercury, XIV (May, 1928),
127.
81
Mencken, "Fiction in Adept Hands," American Mercury,
XXI (January, 1930), 127.
82
Mencken, "The Spanish Idea of a Good Time," American
Mercury, XXVII (December, 1932), 506.
62
the realism in which they believed was still considered

shabby. Not only was Mencken sensitive to the ability of
these authors, he gave them personal encouragement and public
support when necessary. In particular he was unstinted in
support of Dreiser's right to be published and gave Lewis
advice which Lewis later gratefully acknowledged. For a
decade he waged a lonely campaign to raise Twain to his
rightful eminence in our literature and introduced Conrad's
powerful works to discerning Americans. Eventually, Mencken
came to be recognized by the realists as their particular
champion.
In his critical opinions Mencken left no doubt as to

what his criteria for judgment were (despite what his
opponents claimed) and he was consistent in their applica-
tion. In the light of contemporary criticism his only notable
misjudgment was of Lawrence, but Mencken was true to his
standards of taste in rejecting him. While Mencken con-
sidered Joyce primarily an experimenter in prose, he at
least acknowledged the brilliance of the man. His acute
evaluations of Bennett and Wells, who were very popular in
their time, have been borne out substantially intact by
present judgment. His objectiveness toward Lewis' later
works was not tempered by his earlier enthusiasm at having
found an effective social critic, nor did his obvious im-
patience at Anderson's erratic progress dilute his appraisal
of Anderson's historical position in American literature.
63
During the period he was active as a critic—the era he

might be expected to have been most concerned with—Mencken
did very well; and, as a critic concerned primarily with the
advancement of American letters and more explicitly the
novel, very well indeed.
CHAPTER IV
MENCKEN'S CRITICISM OF POETRY
When Mencken's criticism of poetry is compared to his

criticism of prose, every indication points to his preference
for prose. Critics have declared that he was unqualified to
write about poetry because of his lack of knowledge and his
bias, allegedly proven by his judgments of poets and his
disparaging comments on the art in general. However, there
is plentiful evidence that points to his having had both an
adequate knowledge of and a qualified liking for poetry.
Briefly his preference was for traditional forms of verse,
thereby putting him at odds with new trends developing during
his tenure as a critic. But, despite his adherence to an
outdated concept of the art, Mencken gave a hearing to the
new poets. Along with his preference for such relative un-
knowns as Lizette Woodworth Reese and John McClure, he also
liked Sandburg, Pound, Masters, and Teasdale; so his taste
was not completely counter to present evaluations.
Mencken began the criticism of poetry with his assump-
tion of the post of book-reviewer for the Smart Set in 1908.
^"A typical cross section.of comment on Mencken's poetry

criticism can be found in Carl R. Dolmetsch's "H. L. Mencken
as a Critic of Poetry," Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien, XI
(June, 1965), 83-84.
64
65
Once begun, he established a routine of reviewing poetry once

every eight or ten months, covering the large number of books
that had accumulated since his previous review. In addition,
he occasionally wrote a piece on a poet or on some aspect
of poetry; one of these essays, "Reflections on Poetry," was
expanded into "The Poet and His Art" in his Prejudices series,
After Mencken switched over to the Mercury, his reviews
tapered off and he did only two of them in that magazine,
the last appearing in 1926. Taken as a whole and consider-
ing the eighteen years during which he reviewed poetry, the
volume of his poetry criticism is slight.
The aforementioned "The Poet and His Art" presented a
clear exposition of Mencken's concept of poetry. In it
Mencken declared that poetry was the inferior sister to
prose, a statement not surprising for a man of his pragmatic,
earthy leanings. He contended that while generations of
authors are required to produce good prose, good poetry
. . i s often written by peoples and individuals whose
2
prose is . . . crude and graceless." And, in the same
vein, Mencken went on to point out that poetry was tradi-
3
tionally and correctly linked with youth.
Mencken, continuing, claimed that prose was based
primarily upon logic while poetry depended upon sensation
2I
'Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, p. 146.
*Ibid. , p. 147.
3.
66
4
and emotion. He contended that poetry permitted nonsensi-
calities by affording the poet a framework for uttering
5
falsehoods. After giving several definitions of poetry,
Mencken proposed one of his own, to wit: " . . . poetry may
6
be either . . . caressing music or caressing assurance."
Mencken praised Sidney Lanier's book The Science of English
Verse as being the original exposition of the musical aspect
of poetry, although Mencken pointed out that it did net
7
consider the sound of words, only the element of rhythm.
Rhythm, or orderliness as Mencken expressed it, plus
euphonious words constituted Mencken's conception of the
musical type of poetry.
Mencken cited a Dr. Prescott's book Poetry and Dreams
for the rationale of his second type of poetry, agreeing
with Dr. Prescott that poetry was " . . . verbal materializa-
tion of a daydream." In developing this theme, Mencken
classified poetry as being either a denial of what he called
objective fact, God's lack of concern for man, or the denial
of what he called subjective fact, man's lack of control of
8
his own fate. Mencken believed that man's conscious and
subconscious desires often diverged and that poetry appealed
g
to the sublimated side of man's nature.
Îbid., p. 148. Îbid., p. 149.

6>Ibid., p. 151. 7Ibid., p. 152.
8 9
Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., pp. 157-159.
67
In keeping with his idea that poetry was a denial of

facts and sometimes also a form of music, Mencken saw no
need to dissect it critically. He maintained that an analy-
sis of a poem would be ". . . something akin to performing
an autopsy upon a butterfly—with a crowbar. Such exquisite
things do not bear the prodding and vivisecting of criticism.
. . . I do not try to explain and defend these things intel-
lectually; I merely tell you that they caress and enchant
me emotionally.""^ Inasmuch as Mencken felt that rationality
was inappropriate to the creation of poetry, it is not sur-
prising that his reviews were often conducted with a notice-
able amount of levity when he felt the poems he was reviewing
fell short of good art.
Mencken outraged some critics with his statements on

the classical epic poems. The pretentiousness that he saw
in the epics prompted him to dismiss them as being "hoary old
bores," and he claimed that "they belong to the childhood of
poetry, and their chief appeal is still to the childish—
e.£., to pedagogues. To say that they represent a height of
achievement which the poetry of our own time had not sur-
passed is . . . ridiculous . . . . i n commenting upon
the "gorgeous unveracity" of poetry, he asked, "Suppose the
^Mencken, "Exeunt Omnes" (December, 1919), cited in

Dolmetsch, "Mencken as a Critic of Poetry," p. 94.
11
Mencken, "The Troubadours A-Twitter" (May, 1915), re-
printed in Nolte. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. 84.
68
Odyssey, for example, were reduced to straightforward prose;

what would be the result? Simply a long story of tedious
impossibilities. So, too, with the Iliad, the Divine Comedy,
12
Paradise Lost, and the Psalms." This attitude alone would
have been enough to preclude any of the traditional critics
from taking him seriously as a critic of poetry.
Mencken had little to say about any of the traditional
English poets except Shakespeare, and he used him primarily
to support his contention that good poetry was not intellec-
tual. He said that the appeal of the works of Shakespeare
and other great poets lay in their music, claiming that "as
it is intoned on the stage by actors, the poetry of Shake-
speare commonly loses content altogether . . . . One can
only observe that it is beautiful." Mencken, who always
praised the sonnet form, concluded that " . . . the English
language reaches in them [Shakespeare's sonnets] the topmost
13
heights of conceivable beauty." It was just such beauty
that Mencken contended it would be folly to analyze.
/
The more contemporary of the British poets were cited

by Mencken merely as examples of varying styles. He admitted
his early liking for Kipling and Tennyson, referring to
Kipling's "drum beat" and Tennyson's "mellow romanticism.1,14
12
Mencken, "Lizette Woodworth Reese" (May, 1910), re-
13
Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, pp. 164-165.
14
Ibid., p. 160.
69
In describing Kipling's attraction,-Wie noted that his appeal

was to ". . . the bully and braggart type, the chest-slapping
15
type, the patriot type." Mencken lumped Francis Thompson
and Yeats together with Crashaw as being mystical poets and
described Swinburne as a writer of "gorgeous blasphemies.11
While Mencken observed that Browning was a poet whose work
was logical in content, he claimed that his chief propagandist
in America was "an obscure professor of English who was also
17
an ardent spook-chaser."
The poetry of Oscar Wilde impressed Mencken probably
in great part due to the conventionality of his verse form.
In contrast to the brief treatment he accorded other British
poets, he wrote three pieces on Wilde. Mencken cited
Wilde's "Ave Imperatrix," "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," and
"Easter Day" as being "striking and beautiful poems, with
18
music in them and the great human note." Later that same
year—1910—Mencken linked "Easter Day" with Keats's sonnet
on Chapman's Homer and Milton's sonnet on his blindness.
As for Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol," Mencken called it
1Q
" . . . the noblest ballad in English. . . . "
15 16
Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 156.
Îbid. , pp. 161-162.
18
Mencken, "A Note on Oscar Wilde" (January, 1910),
19
Mencken, "Portrait of a Tragic Comedian" (September,
1916), reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism,
p. 217.
70
Among the earlier American poets, Mencken concerned

himself almost exclusively with Poe and Whitman, but his
appreciation of Poe's art was tepid at best and his professed
admiration of Whitman's poetry was not satisfactorily ex-
plained. Mencken acknowledged that Poe had written a few
good poems, noting that his reputation was " . . . based upon
five short poems. Of them, three are almost pure music.
20
No one would venture to reduce them to plain English."
To illustrate the need for stimulation in the creative act,
he said that if Poe never had been goaded to rebel he
" . . . would probably have written poetry indistinguishable
from the hollow stuff of, say, Prof. Dr. George E. Wood-
21
berry." However, Mencken considered most of Poe's work

uninspired, asserting that "nine tenths of his [Poe's] poetry
is so artificial that it is difficult to imagine even college
22
tutors reading it voluntarily. . . . "
Mencken accepted Poe's "The Poetic' Principle" much more
enthusiastically than his poems. In speaking of his aesthetic
beliefs, Mencken said that Poe reacted " . . . against the
false concept of beauty as a mere handmaiden of logical
ideas. . . . " Mencken maintained that Poe's better poems
were faithful to this belief and that "The Poetic Principle"
20
" Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, p. 152.
21
Ibid., p. 103.
22
Mencken, "Fifteen Years" (December, 1923) , reprinted
71
23
stated this concept more clearly than any other exposition.
Striking points of similarity to Mencken's own beliefs are
seen in Poe's disparagement of epic poems, his contention
that truth and didacticism were inimical to poetry, and his
belief that music was a vitally important adjunct to poetry.^
While Mencken termed Whitman "the greatest poet that
25
America had ever produced," he furnished no arguments to
substantiate such a claim. On the contrary he called Whit-
man's verse "sonorous strophes to an imaginary and pre-
26
posterous democracy." And while he said that the neglect
of Whitman, Melville, and Twain constituted the "three great
27
disgraces of American letters," he described Leaves of
Grass as having become popular only because of its supposed
28
salaciousness and political usefulness to native radicals.
In the absence of any viable comment on Whitman's poetry, it
is difficult not to conclude that Mencken was actually more
23
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series (New York,
1920), p. 61.
24
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle," The Complete
Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Hervey Allen
(New York, 1938), pp. 889-894.
25
26
Mencken, Prejudices; Fifth Series, p. 205.
27
- H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fourth Series (New York,
1924) , p. 19.
28
Mencken, Prejudices: Fifth Series, pp. 203-204.
72
interested in Whitman as a symbol of America's suppression

of artists than as a poet.
Mencken generally treated the older contemporary
British poets with respect although he mentioned them in-
frequently. Thomas Hardy received one of his longest and
most explicit comments. Mencken stated that "his [Hardy's]
verse is gnarled and even tortured; his emotions seem to en-
counter difficulties in breaking through the barrier of
speech; at times he grows almost incoherent"; but, despite
this, "the vision rises up. The feeling leaps to the reader.
29
So the business of the poet is accomplished." Mencken
noted that Robert Bridges' poetry had impressed the new
poets in England as being archaic and offensive, but he
claimed that Bridges outshone them with his dignity, skill
30
with words, and urbane and civilized air. The attraction
of the poetry of Hardy and Bridges, in contrast to that of
Wilde, seemed to have been, its rustic qualities. On the
other hand, where the early Yeats was concerned, Mencken was
content to describe him as ". . . a fantastic pale green
31
mystic. . . ."
29
H. L. Mencken, "Books of Verse," American Mercury,
VIII (June, 1926),.253.
30t, • .
Ibid.
31
Mencken, "On Playgoers—And on Hauptmann, Synge, and
Shaw" (August, 1911), reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's Smart
Set Criticism, p. 51.
73
Mencken welcomed the first manifestations of imagist

poetry in America and discussed its practitioners in essays
and reviews. He quoted Amy Lowell's statement that the aim
of the imagists was to ". . . find new and striking images,
delightful and unexpected forms," and he noted that they
32
seemed to be producing excellent poetry. Four year later
Mencken could still say that ". . . i t [the imagist poetry]
is honest and worthy of praise. It has, for one thing, made
an effective war upon the cliche, and so purged the nation
33
of much of its old banality in subject and phrase." Con-
tinuing, Mencken added that it had replaced conventionality
with daring experimentation and curiosity about life, pro-
ducing . .. poetry vivid and full of human interest, as it
34
was in the days of Elizabeth." • Mencken's one note of dis-
satisfaction was that the movement had not produced any
first-rate poet.3^
Mencken claimed to have read nearly all of the new
36
poetry and was well enough acquainted with the movement to
describe its origins. Characteristically, he described the
37
poetry as being neither American nor democratic. Although
Mencken credited Whitman with having had some influence on its
32
Mencken, "The Troubadours A-Twitter" (May, 1915), re-
33
3 3
Îbid. , p. 95. ~*Ibid. , p. 96.
36 37
Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 92.
74
practitioners, he gave France as its birthplace. Further,

he described almost all of the better-known new poets as
being under foreign influence and the poetry they produced
as being " . . . quite beyond their [the American people's]
38
understanding." Nevertheless, he claimed that by having
been exposed to the new poetry "the relatively civilized
[American] reader has been educated to something better.
He has heard a music that has spoiled his ear for the old
wheezing of the melodeon. He weeps no more over what wrung
39
him yesteryear."
By 1925, however, Mencken had come to see the imagist
movement as having lost its vitality, complaining that
" . . . the fine frenzy which seized the poets fifteen years
ago has spent itself, and they-are laid up for repairs. It
was something of an adventure in those days—or even so
lately as five years ago--to review the current verse.
By the next year Mencken had completely' retracted his
previous approbation, professing his relief'that "the poets
are forgetting the vain uproar over form, and giving their
head to matter. The imbecilities of the free verse era seem
to be over. It is no longer possible to concede a lack of
38 39
Ibid., pp. 92-93. Ibid., p. 95.
40
* Mencken, "Poetry," American Mercury, VI (October,
1925), 252.
75
41
ideas by arranging inanities in new figures." However,
Mencken probably revealed his main objection to the free
verse poets when he claimed that most of them were not able
42
to write according to the orthodox rules of prosody.
Seemingly in accordance with his pronouncement that
poetry is best written by the young, Mencken generally had
grown more dissatisfied with what he believed was the in-
ability of the imagist poets to progress beyond mere novelty.
Coincidentally, his observation that the movement was burn-
ing itself out came about the time he was himself becoming
weary of criticism—he noted the virtual demise of the move-
ment in the only two poetry reviews he wrote for the Mercury
43
although he had seen the signs earlier. But while Mencken
eventually became disillusioned with the imagists, he had
given the leaders of the group a warm reception and a chance
to air their poetry.
The cool intellectual art of T. S.' Eliot and his
imitators was too alien to Mencken's conception of poetry
to elicit any sympathy from him. Reiterating his definition
of poetry, Mencken said that "its purpose is not to establish
41
Mencken, "Books of Verse," American Mercury, VIII
(June, 1926), 253.
42
Mencken, Prejudices; Fifth Series, p. 205.
43
Mencken, Prejudices; First Series, p. 85.
76
44
facts, but to evade and deny them." Decrying the new
poets' lack of emotion, he maintained that "poetry can never
be concocted by any purely intellectual process. It has
nothing to do with the intellect: it is, in fact, a violent
45
and irreconcilable enemy to the intellect." Mencken went
on to warn that if the " . . . denial of the bald and dreadful
facts . . ." is removed from poetry ". . . i t simply ceases
to be what it pretends to be [and] ... . cannot stir the
46
blood as true poetry does. . . . " Elsewhere, in a rare
direct reference to Eliot and the beliefs expressed in his
poetry, Mencken stated off-handedly in a review of Eliot's
prose book, For Lancelot Andrews, that it was ". ... hard to
think of the author of "The Waste Land" as a genuine
. . „47
classicist.
Although he virtually ignored Eliot's work in his re-
views, Mencken was less prejudiced toward other contemporary
poets. Pound, Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay, Lowell, Robinson,
and Frost were all duly reviewed with varying degrees of
enthusiasm, although Lizette Woodworth Reese, Sarah Teasdale,
and John McClure were the names most commonly seen in his
columns.
44
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Sixth Series (New York,
1927),
45
p. 176. 46
Ibid. Ibid., p. 177.
47
Mencken, "The New Humanism," American Mercury, XVIII
(September, 1929), 123.
77
Of the new poets Mencken thought Sandburg to be the

48
best. While describing Sandburg as being often crude, un-
certain, and wobbly, he said that he got " . . . memorable
effects by astonishingly austere means, as in his famous
'Chicago Rhapsody' and his 'Cool Tombs.1 And always he is
thoroughly individual, a true individual, his own man."
Possibly still under some influence of Kipling, Mencken
described Sandburg's war poems as being "simple, eloquent
49
and extraordinarily moving." Right behind Sandburg,
Mencken ranked James Oppenheim, who he said was inspired
50
equally by Whitman and the Old Testament. Stating that
Jewish poets are inherently the most rhapsodic of the
artists, Mencken credited Oppenheim at his best with having
51
the "gigantic gusto of Solomon's Song."
Mencken was inconsistent in his appraisal of Edgar Lee
Masters, but when he praised him it was for his Spoon River
Anthology. When Spoon River came out in 1915, Mencken termed
it ". . . true poetry, albeit as gnarled and unadorned as
the pioneers it celebrates. It has sincerity; it has a
delicate fancy; it shows a genuine feeling for beauty."
Continuing, Mencken saw in it ". . . a sense of spaciousness,
of epic sweep and dignity, of universal tragedy," despite
48
49 .
Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., pp. 86-87.
51
Ibid., p. 87.
78
52
the fact that it dealt with small men. However, four
years later Mencken maintained that Spoon River was not
novel, nor poignant, nor truthful, but was read for its
53
supposed salaciousness. But m his last extensive comment
on Masters, Mencken called Spoon River " . . . unquestionably
the most eloquent, the most profound and the most thoroughly
national volume of verse published in America since Leaves
of Grass." Nevertheless, in the same article, he called the
rest of Masters' poems "a great mass of feeble and pre-

54
posterous doggerel. . . . "
The inconsistency of Mencken's criticism of Vachel
Lindsay resembled that of Masters. While Mencken named

Lindsay's "General William Booth Enters Heaven" a pioneering
55
poem, he described his other early poems as " . . . an echo
of the barbaric rhythms of the Jubilee Songs" which had
56
degenerated into elephantine college yells." While call-
ing Lindsay "superficially the most national" of the new
57
poets, Mencken, referring to his recital tours, claimed V
" . . . that the yokels welcomed him, not because they were
^Mencken, "The Troubadours A-Twitter" (May, 1915), re-
53
54
Mencken, "Edqar Lee Masters," American Mercury, II
(June, 1924), 250.
55
Îbid. , p. 89. Îbid. , p. 84.
79
interested in his poetry, but because it struck them as an

amazing . . . thing, for a sane man to go about the country
58
on any such bizarre and undemocratic business." Still,
after having accused the new poets of trying to rationalize
poetry and trying to detach themselves from the ordinary
flow of American ideas, Mencken credited Sandburg and Lindsay
with having seen the folly of such alienation. Consequently,
he maintained that Lindsay, along with Sandburg, had written
59
a few poems which the literates had appreciated, another
way of saying that their poetry had returned to conventional
sentiment.
Ezra Pound was one of the early imagists with whom
Mencken did not eventually become disenchanted. As with
Kipling, Hardy, and Sandburg, Pound had a roughhewn quality
that bespoke his deliberately masculine approach to poetry.
Mencken said of Pound's verse, "The pale thing we commonly
call beauty is seldom in them. They are rough, uncouth,
hairy, barbarous, wild. But once the galloping swing of
them is mastered, a sort of stark, heathenish music emerges
from the n o i s e . L a t e r , Mencken called Pound the " . . .
most picturesque man in the [new poetry] movement—a profes-
sor turned fantee, Abelard in grand opera. His knowledge is
CvO
Ibid., p. 94.
59
Mencken, Prejudices: Sixth Series, pp. 178-179.
60
Mencken, "Ezra Pound" (April, 1911), reprinted in
Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. 77.
80
abysmal; he has it readily on tap; moreover he has a fine

61
ear, and has written many an excellent verse." However,
while Mencken understood why Pound would want to rage against
native provincialism, he noted that such feeling was " . . .
fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the
62
poet," a broad hint that poetry must be apolitical.

The poetry of Amy Lowell at first attracted Mencken.
He praised her Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds as containing
six or seven good poems which evoked fine visual images by
63
subtle suggestion. However, he noted that "when she
attempts conventional rhymes and meters Miss Lowell is a
good deal less successful. Her long ballads, indeed, are
frankly third rate. But in the new forms she offers work of
64
unmistakable distinction. . . ." Four years later Mencken
"i
dubbed her " . . . the schoolmarm of the movement, and vastly

more the pedagogue than the artist," although he granted
that she " . . . has written perhaps half a dozen excellent
pieces in imitation of Richard Aldington and John Gould
Fletcher. . . . " He now maintained that her reputation had
61
62
Ibid.
63
Mencken, "The Troubadours A-Twitter" (May, 1915),
reprinted in Nolte, Mencken1s Smart Set Criticism, p. 88.
64t, . ,
Ibid.
65
81
been enhanced by her social position.^ Seven years later

Mencken dismissed her by claiming that"the whole body of
verse of Miss Lowell is as dead as if it had been written
in Choctaw.
Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson got short
shrift from Mencken. In his most comprehensive statement
about the two poets he was not flattering.
Frost? A standard New England poet, with
a few changes in phraseology, and the substitu-
tion of sour resignationism for sweet resignation-
ism. Whittier without the whiskers. Robinson?
Ditto, but with a politer bow. He has written
sound poetry, but not much of it. The late Major- gg
General Roosevelt ruined him by praising him . . . .
Mencken identified Frost's "North of Boston" as having been

69
one of the salient documents of the new poetry movement
but credited him with having composed perhaps only one or
70
two poems which reached "the generality of the literate."
In this connection Mencken did not mention Robinson at all,
despite his earlier remark about his having written sound
poetry. And, in another post-mortem of the movement, Mencken
recalled Frost's "melancholy moans," but again did not see
71
fit to mention Robinson.
66
Ibid., pp. 87-88.
cn
Mencken, Prejudices: Sixth Series, p. 179.
68 69
Ibid., pp. 83-84. Ibid.
70
Mencken, Prejudices: Sixth Series, pp. 178-179.
71
Mencken, "Poetry," American Mercury, VI (October,
1925), 252.
82
In the eyes of the critics Mencken's loyalty toward the

poems of the lowly regarded Miss Reese and John McClure over-
shadowed the attention he gave to the new poets. The work
of these two poets, along with that of Sarah Teasdale,
appeared more often in the Smart Set than that of any other
poets and Mencken's praise of their poetry was unqualified.
In comparing the old style of poetry with the new, Mencken
contended that "there is no poet in the movement [the
imagists] who has produced anything even remotely approaching
the fine lyrics of Miss Reese, Miss Teasdale and John

72
McClure. . . . " Here were poets who used the traditional
rhythmical cadences combined with words chosen for their
musical content.
Mencken was particularly taken with Miss Reese's poem,
"Tears," calling it ". . . a sonnet that no other American
73
has ever approached." He noted that "like most other
poems from Miss Reese's pen, it is written in the severely
plain and almost austere tongue of early England . . . the
words, in brief, are short and common, but there is music in
them and more music in their felicitous collocation."^
Dolmetsch's contention that "Tears" embodied Mencken's poetic
theories can hardly be contested; besides its traditional
72
Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, p. 30.
73
Mencken, "Lizette Woodworth Reese" (May, 1910), re-
74T, . ,
Ibid.
83
form and simple words, its denial of facts was couched in a

plea for release from life's sadness.
When I consider life and its few years—
A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun;
A call to battle, and the battle done
Ere the last echo dies within our ears;
A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears;
The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat;
The burst of music down an unlistening street
I wonder at the idleness of tears.
Ye old, old dead, and ye of yesternight
Chieftains and bards and keepers of the sheep,
By every cup of sorrow that you had,
Loose me from tears, and make me see aright
How each hath back what once he stayed to weep:
Homer his sight, David his little lad.
Mencken's attempts at writing poetry indicate the strong
attraction poetry had for him as a youth. While his enthusi-
asm for poetry seemingly waned later in life, it was because
of his reconsideration of the value of the content of poetry,
not because of any lessening of his appreciation for its
sound. On the contrary, Mencken's ear for poetry, sharpened
by his musical background and his love for words, became more
discriminating and he understandably balked at trying to
interpret what he believed was created for beauty of sound,
not thought content. While this attitude made him suspect
as a critic of poetry, it indicates that he may have been
more truly appreciative of the art than his detractors.
In marked contrast to his ideological rapport with the
new American novelists, Mencken advocated a traditional view
of poetry that contemporary poets were repudiating. This
Îbid. , p. 73.
84
seeming inconsistency vanishes when Mencken's literary values

are considered; as has been seen, Mencken made no secret of
his belief that prose was preeminent over poetry because of
its nobler concern for the truth. While not usually so
76
plainly stated except possibly by Plato, this view has been
carried down through the ages and, if the truth were known,
is probably the prevalent view of most people. Mencken
merely had the audacity to voice such a view aloud.
On the other hand, Mencken's willingness to give an
airing to the new trends in poetry and his praise of what-
ever poetry he saw some merit in, regardless of its form or
content, was the true indication of his fairness as a critic.
The publicity he gave to the rising poets of his generation
in the Smart Set and Mercury had a wider range than that
which could be gotten in the struggling poetry magazines of
the day. Regardless of his stated opinions, in providing
the poets with another public forum, Mencken did them indeed
a great service.
76
Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato, translated by W. H. D.
Rouse (New York, 1956), pp. 124-125.
CHAPTER V
MENCKEN'S CRITICISM OF DRAMA
In contrast to the hubbub that attended Mencken's

activities as a critic of fiction and the disdain with which
he was received as a critic of poetry, the comparative
dearth of comment that met his criticism of drama may seem
unusual. Part of this relative obscurity is due to the fact
that his taste in drama ran parallel to that of his profes-
sional contemporaries, not ahead of it as in the case of
fiction or counter to it as in the case of his preferences
in poetry. However, while he could not take credit for being
the first American critic to recognize the talent of'such
Europeans as Shaw, Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Strindberg,"*" Mencken
was able to give their work a wider hearing through his
books and magazine articles than those who knew of them
earlier.
One reason for Mencken's comparative obscurity as a

drama critic was his long association with George Jean Nathan.
By virtue of his collaboration with Nathan on the Smart Set
and the early Mercury, Mencken did not make criticism of
drama one of his prime concerns during his career as a
^H. L. Mencken, "James Gibbons Huneker," reprinted in

Huntington Cairns, editor, H. L. Mencken: The American Scene
(New York, 1965), p. 409.
85
86
literary critic. His collaboration with Nathan would not

have been of such duration had he harbored radically different
views on drama or had he usurped too much of what was Nathan's
primary responsibility. Still, in his years on the Smart
Set, Mencken managed to voice significant and frequent
2
comment on the art, probably prompted more by genuine
interest than by duty.
Mencken began reviewing drama before taking up either
the criticism of poetry or fiction. During his early news-
paper days in Baltimore—from 1901 to 1906—he got his first
instruction and experience in reviewing plays as one of his
duties as a reporter. During this period he found time to
write his longest single exposition on drama, George Bernard
Shaw: His Plays (1905), which .was the first book to discuss
3
the Irishman's plays. After Mencken joined the staff of
the Smart Set, he continued to write on the drama, some of
which pieces later appeared in his Prejudices books. His
basic theories on the art were set forth in•"Reflections on
the Drama," which first came out in the Smart Set in 1920
and which was also included in Prejudices: Third Series.
In addition, he wrote the introductions to translations of
Brieux's Blanchette and The Escape (1913) and Ibsen's Master
2
•Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, p. xxiii.
3
87
Builder, Pillars of Society, and Hedda Gabler (1917).

Finally, trying his own hand at drama, Mencken collaborated
with Nathan on the farce Heliogabalus: A Buffoonery in Three
Acts (1920).
Although Mencken had willingly given up reviewing plays
4
during his newspaper work in Baltimore, his pieces on the
drama in the Smart Set revealed the appreciation and knowl-
edge of drama of a discriminating critic quite aware of the
more significant trends of the theater. What had previously
alienated Mencken from the business of drama reviewing was
not necessarily the plays themselves but the ordeal of
sitting through poorly acted and poorly staged productions;
consequently, he preferred to read published versions of
plays rather than to suffer through performances. Mencken,
in those early days, had found American plays inferior to
the work of the better European playwrights; and, judging
from the virtual absence of American dramatists' names in
his columns, he had found no sign of any native talent
promising enough to give his attention to.
The plays of such European favorites of Mencken as
Ibsen, the early Shaw, and Hauptmann were notable for their
realism and simple•themes, qualities he looked for in novels.
4
H. L. Mencken, Newspaper Days (New York, 1947), p. 126.
5
Mencken, "On Playgoers--And on Hauptmann, Synge, and
Set Criticism, p. 50, and in "Getting Rid of the Actor"
(September, 1913), Ibid., p. 55.
88
In fact, Mencken envisioned the requisites of a good play

as being similar to those of a good novel—believable
characterization, lack of didacticism, a sense of the un-
6
certainty of life — b u t with these qualities presented in a
much briefer context. More particularly he believed that
the brevity of a play, coupled with its function as enter-
7
tainment, made it a more limited art form than the novel
and a more logical vehicle for the ridiculous aspects of
8
life than its tragic aspects.
Mencken pointed out that the modern dramatist, while
commendably trying to foster realism, omitted the interpretive
or descriptive devices that were formerly used to aid the
9
development of plot." Consequently, he argued that a play
could represent with thoroughness little more than a com-
paratively short episode; but, even then, it often left the
audience harboring widely differing interpretations as to
what occurred or deducing nonexistent meaning from what was
said. For the playwright to forestall wide misinterpretation,
Mencken maintained that he was forced to work with plots and
ideas that were actually simple, easily recognizable plati-
tudes that concerned the emotions rather than abstract ideas.
He put it thus: "The best a dramatist can hope to do is to
^Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, p. 126.
Îbid., p. 308. Îbid., p. 300.
9 10
lbid., pp. 304-305. Ibid., p. 300.
89
give poignant and arresting expression to an idea so simple

that the average man will grasp it at once, and so banal
that he will approve it in the next instant."*''*' In support
of this belief, Mencken claimed that platitudes were found
necessary by even the most successful of the dramatists, in-
cluding Shakespeare, whom he proclaimed as the greatest of
12
them all.
As an added rationale for plots with easily digestible
subject matter, Mencken cited drama as being the only form
of literature composed for the express purpose of having a
group of people appreciate it en masse. Put another way, he
13
saw drama as being the only truly "democratic" art form
an uncomplimentary word in his Nietzschean lexicon. And,
belittling the difficulty that .the creation of drama entailed,
Mencken declared that whenever a writer has essayed both the
novel and drama, he had found the drama a much less demanding
14
exercise, and cited Arnold Bennett as a' case m point.
Probably Mencken's involvement in the writing of Heliogabalus
was motivated primarily by his desire to prove the ease with
which a play could be composed.
During the formative period of Mencken's philosophy he
noted similarities between Shaw's beliefs and his own. So
it was more than coincidence that in his book, George Bernard
1:L 12
Ibid. Ibid. , p. 308.
13 14
Ibid., p. 299. Ibid., p. 304.
90
Shaw: His Plays, Mencken asserted that Shaw was the ideologi-
15
cal descendant of Darwin, Spencer, Nietzsche, and Huxley,
the same men whom he later acknowledged as being among his
own intellectual mentors. He noted that after Darwin
commonly held virtues began to be challenged and that Shaw
followed Ibsen's example in adapting this questioning of
morals to drama.^ It is apparent from the tone of the
introduction of his book on Shaw that the iconoclastic
characteristic of Shaw's plays caught Mencken's fancy as
quickly as it had shocked the playgoers. Still, Mencken
admired the Irishman's skill at creating drama apart from
the ideological overtones it included.
Shaw's most common dramatic device, as Mencken saw it,
was the presentation of "the current conflict between
17
orthodoxy and heterodoxy" with characters representing a
18
virtue as a vice in disguise or vice versa. Mencken noted
that, with the exception of his prefaces, Shaw did not
moralize in his plays; on the contrary, he presented the
situations in such a way that the spectator would see new
rules of human conduct contrasted with the old, enabling him
to draw his own conclusion as to the validity of either
19
point of view — i n other words, Shaw wanted to make the
15
H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw; His Plays
(Boston, 1905), p. x.
~Îbid. , p. xii. ~Îbid., p. xvi.
18.-, . -j . . 19T, • j
Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., p. xiv.
91
20
spectator think. In this connection Mencken emphasized
that "as long as a dramatist is faithful to his task of
depicting human life as he sees it, it is of small conse-
quence whether the victory in the dramatic conflict goes to
21
one side or the other." Further, he said that instead of
concerning himself about which view prevails, the playwright
should concentrate instead on a realistic presentation of
22
the struggle.
In his book on Shaw, Mencken concluded that many of
Shaw's plays were not destined for popularity in the United
States for a number of reasons. He pointed out that their
presumed intellectuality was attractive only to a limited
number of people, that plays such as Mrs. Warren's Profession
concerned an unmentionable subject, and that Shaw's satirical
wit was unpopular with the average playgoer who was under-
standably sensitive about seeing his own doctrines and
23
ldiosyncracies made light of.
While he touched on the origins of Shaw's philosophy in
the first part of the introduction, Mencken devoted.most of
his attention to his technique of dramatizing. He briefly
described the action of all of the plays, carefully analyzing
the principal characters and the underlying philosophy of
each situation. Of the fourteen plays he reviewed, Mencken
20 T , . , . 21 , . ,
Ibid., p. xxiv. Ibid., p. xix.
22 21
Ibid., p. xx. Ibid., p. xxvi.
92
declared that Man and Superman was Shaw's masterpiece and

expressed admiration for the wit, characterization, dialogue,
and structure of Mrs. Warren's Profession, Caesar and
Cleopatra, Candida, and A Man of Destiny.
However, in subsequent articles in the Smart Set,
Mencken devoted the bulk of his comment to Shaw the man,
discussing such things as the means by which Shaw gained his
notoriety, his increasing didacticism, and the allegation
that his true nature was generally misunderstood. In a
review of Chesterton's book on Shaw in 1910, Mencken omitted
any comment on Shaw as a playwright, but instead paid tribute
to his proficiency in the art of "stirring up of the animals."^
By 1911, Mencken noted the same failing in Shaw that he
later saw in H. G. Wells—the tendency to take himself too
seriously. While he admitted that Shaw still confined his
comments to his prefaces, Mencken claimed that his plays
were becoming obviously the means to emphasize the ideas of
the prefaces rather than the other way around, as had been
25
the case previously. ' In a 1916 article entitled "Shaw as
Platitudinarian," Mencken refuted the popular belief that
Shaw was in any way heretical or even truly Irish, but
24
Mencken, "Chesterton's Picture of Shaw" (January,
1910), reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism,
p. 50:
25
93
contended that he was in reality a puritanical Scottish

Presbyterian devoid of the romanticism so commonly attributed
26
to the Irish. Ten years later in a letter to Upton

Sinclair, Mencken predicted that if Shaw were remembered
fifty years hence it would . . b e for his earlier
plays. . . ,"2^
Whereas Mencken considered the later Shaw more of a
political and intellectual oddity than a playwright, he
always considered Ibsen a single-minded dramatist. Mencken
called Ibsen . . a first-rate journeyman dramatist, per-
28
haps the best that ever lived." He observed that through-
out the course of Ibsen's career, his audiences had accused
him of attacking various aspects of society through the
medium of his drama, and that the resultant furor over the
% ^
themes of the plays had obscured the novelty of their

29
structure. Noting that while it took some twenty years
for Ibsen's plays to be universally recognized by playgoers
as aesthetic creations in fact as well as by intention,
Mencken claimed that Ibsen's fellow dramatists quietly began
30
adopting his changes almost immediately. He listed Jones,
26
Mencken, "Shaw as Platitudinarian" (August, 1916),
27
H. L. Mencken, Letters of H. L. Mencken, edited by
Guy JV Forgue (New York, 1961), p. 294.
2 8 .
Henrik Ibsen, The Master Builder, Pillars of Society,
Hedda 29Gabler, edited by H. L. Mencken
3
(New York, 1917), p. v.
Ibid. Îbid., p. x.
94
Pinero, Shaw, Hauptmann, Gorki, Hervieu, Brieux, and many

lesser dramatists as having deserted Scribe's example in
favor of Ibsen's. By 1917, said Mencken, performances in
31
the manner of Scribe were being laughed at by audiences.
The initial reaction of theatergoers to Ibsen's plays
seemed to Mencken to have been ironically a stimulus to
Ibsen's career. He maintained that Ibsen, angered at re-
peated attempts by the public to read nonexistent signifi-
cance into each of his plays, would respond by producing
another play burlesquing the previous one. Hence, when A
Doll's House was purported to advocate free love, he wrote
Ghosts to ridicule the aroused moralists. When this ploy
failed to quiet the hubbub, he brought out The Wild Duck to
ridicule the self-styled cognoscenti of drama and Hedda
Gabler, which Mencken claimed was deliberately composed of
the stalest, most worked-over plots of his fellow dramatists,
32
to quiet charges of iconoclasm. —a.nd all the while Ibsen
was refining his technique. Mencken cited the contents of
>
Ibsen's notes as furnishing irrefutable evidence of his

complete lack of desire to stimulate reforms through the
medium of his plays and also as giving proof of his lack of
33
preoccupation with'symbolism.
31 32 ...
Ibid. , pp. x-xi. Ibid., p. v n i .
33
Ibid. , pp. vn-viii.
95
Ibsen's letters convinced Mencken that, while Ibsen

concentrated on the practical aspects of drama, he was not
overly concerned with a story as long as it involved con-
34
flict. He quoted Ibsen as saying, "It was not my desire
to deal in this play [Hedda Gabler] with so-called problems.
What I wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emo-
tions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of
35
the social conditions and principles of the present day."
Mencken described Ibsen's technique as the abandonment of
monologues, asides, couriers, and gossiping minor characters
as superfluous expediencies and letting the story tell it-
36
self. Mencken said that, as a result, the audience
" . . . found its nerves racked by a glimpse through a
37
terrifying keyhole."
Mencken viewed the public misinterpretation of Strind-
berg's art as having been similar to that which plagued
Ibsen. After commenting disparagingly on Strindberg's
gullibility and ingenuousness, Mencken observed that
r
". . . h e had, for all his folly, a considerable native skill

at devising effective stage-plays—a talent that some men
seem to be born with—and under cover of it he acquired his
38
reputation as a thinker. While he judged Strindberg's
34 35
Ibid. , p. ix. Ibid. , p. x n .
Îbid., pp. ix-x. Îbid. , p. x.
38
Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, pp. 306-307.
96
The Father a masterpiece of drama and his Lady Julie, The

Stronger, The Link, The Dream Play, and both parts of The
39
Dance of Death all "extremely clever plays," he indicated
that their popular success was attributable to their plati-
tudinous or sensational material and only indirectly due to
their clever structure.^
Mencken said much less approbatory things about Strind-
berg and his audiences than he said about his plays. In a
statement reminiscent of comment he had made about Ibsen,
Mencken claimed that the "defective powers of observation
and reflection" of Strindberg's playgoers were responsible
for the supposed intellectual content attributed to his
41
plays. Mencken dwelt at length on Strindberg's tempestuous
private life, made public by the dramatist's tendency to
include autobiographical material in his plays and novels,
and seemed to be fascinated by Strindberg's exotic enthusiasms,
42
marital battles, and ultimate insanity. But while Mencken
appeared to be trying to find something disparaging to say
about Strindberg's talent for drama, the worst he could
39
Mencken, "Strindberg—A Final Estimate" (August, 1913),
40
Mencken, Prejudices; Third Series, p. 307.
41 tk •
Ibid.
42
Mencken, "Strindberg—A Final Estimate" (August, 1913),
reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, pp. 65-66.
97
manage was the assertion that his poorer plays were shallow
43
and silly.
The introduction Mencken wrote for two of Eugene
Brieux's plays was not as approving, as that which he did on
Ibsen. However, he gave guarded assent to Shaw's evaluation
of Brieux ". . . as the most important dramatist west of
44
Russia," following Ibsen's death. His objection did not
concern the structure of Brieux's drama: Mencken, while
unsure of the debt Brieux1s innovations in the French
45
theater owed to the example of Ibsen, approved of Brieux's
movement toward realism, noting that his later plays had
46
gone so far as to have neither formal beginnings nor endings.
Mencken stated that he chose Brieux's Blanchette and The
Escape for publication in America because of their signifi-
cance as milestones in Brieux's career and their typical
47
representation of both his weaknesses and his talents.
While Mencken pointed out that Brieux's biting icono-
48
clasm reminded him favorably of Ibsen, he expressed dislike
of Brieux's ideology. Unlike either Shaw or Ibsen, Brieux
supported the bourgeois values of his countrymen, and
Mencken, in character, viewed this conservatism as a serious
43
Ibid., p. 67.
44
* Eugene Brieux, Blanchette and The Escape, preface by
H. L. Mencken (Boston, 1913), p. i.
45 46 -
Ibid., p. iv. Ibid., p. v.
47 T U 1 J . 48,. j
Ibid., p. vi. Ibid., p. iv.
98
49
weakness. In this connection Mencken accused him of lack-
ing either understanding or sympathy for the targets of his
50
barbs and of overexaggeratxng the positions of his un-
51
sympathetic characters. Before continuing to a brief
discussion of all his plays, Mencken noted that Brieux's
attacks were not against basic moral values but against what
Mencken called their "modern embellishments," and he ended
52
by branding him a "stolid and God-fearing man of the people."
Mencken contrasted the work of Gerhart Hauptmann and
Hermann Sudermann, playwrights contemporary to each other
who were both influenced by Ibsen's realism. While Mencken
scornfully observed that Sudermann's Heimat was the most
successful German play to appear after the romantic movement
died and " . . . the most eloquent of all proofs, perhaps, of
53
his lack of force and originality as a dramatist," he
elsewhere named Hauptmann's The Weavers as "one of the most
54
striking and influential of modern German plays."
Mencken devoted a chapter in his Prejudices: First
Series to Sudermann. The main premise of the piece was that
Sudermann vacillated between romanticism and realism and
49 50
Ibid., p. vii. Ibid.
51 52
Ibid., p. vi. Ibid., p. ix.
53
54
99
that his novels and dramas—-notably Heimat—reflected his

indecision and inability to master either point of view.
On the other hand, Mencken declared that Hauptmann was
55
successful with both approaches. In his "Reflections on
the Drama," Mencken noted with approval.Hauptmann1s transi-
tion from the "drama of ideas" to the portrayal of emotions,
saying that ". . . his genius burst through the narrow bounds
of mob ratiocination. . . . A s for Sudermann, he con-
cluded by exhorting the reader to ignore his plays and
57
concentrate instead on his superb short stories.
Not all of the playwrights Mencken admired were exclu-
sively realists: John Millington Synge's drama combined
romanticism and realism to produce plays described as
58
poetic. Mencken observed that critics generally accepted
Synge as a dramatic genius despite his short career and
limited body of works. While Mencken took issue with those
who he said cailed Synge "the greatest dramatist working in
English since the age of Elizabeth," he allowed that Synge,
had he lived longer, undoubtedly would have been indeed
55
56
Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, p. 303.
57
58
Lillian H. Hornstein, G. D. Percy, and Sterling A.
Brown, editors, The Reader's Companion to World Literature
(New York, 1956), p. 434.
100
59
close to the top rank in drama. He pointed to Synge as a
preeminent stylist, but declared that his character studies
and technique of drama, while adequate, had been outdone by
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Galsworthy. Yet he termed The Play-
boy of the Western World an effective and well-constructed
comedy and said that Riders to the Sea ". . . structurally,
60
is an almost perfect piece of craftsmanship."
It was the language in the plays of Synge that strained
Mencken's capacity for praise. In describing the effect of
Riders to the. Sea and The Well of the Saints, Mencken pre-
dicted that the reader would ". . . g o drunk with the sheer
music of the words, as you go drunk over the Queen Mab speech
^-n Romeo
and Juliet, or Faustus's apostrophe to Helen, or
61
the One Hundred and Third Psalm." Although he noted the
Irish-English richness of language in the plays of Lady
Gregory, Lennox Robinson, and Seumas 01Kelly, he credited
Synge with having been the sole Neo-Celt to capture its full
musical qualities. Mencken tacitly acknowledged the poetic
quality of Synge's dramatic dialogue when he said that any
attempt to analyze it rationally—as with poetry—would be
fruitless.62
59
Mencken, "The Greatest Stylist of Modern Times"
(October, 1912), reprinted in Nolte, Mencken's Smart Set
Criticism,
6Q
p. 70. 61
Ibid., p. 71. Ibid.
Îbid.
101
Mencken made no secret about his low opinion of most of

the native drama. He maintained that the theater people and
dramatists with brains, ideas, and professional knowledge
were much more common in Europe than in America, saying that
" . . . some of the least of them are almost as good as our
C O
best." He spoke sarcastically of Augustus Thomas' "corn-
64
doctor magic and Sunday-school platitudes," and virtually
ignored Clyde Fitch. But, despite Mencken's general dis-
paragement of Greenwich Village letters, he pronounced
Eugene O'Neill's one-act plays, Rita Wellman's The Gentile
Wife, and Zoe Akins' Papa superior drama which somehow had
65
avoided the studied Village rebelliousness.
Mencken recognized O'Neill's pioneering role in American
drama. In looking back at the changes in the theater during
his years with the Smart Set, he said that "if Eugene O'Neill
had come to Broadway with The Emperor Jones or The Hairy Ape,
he would have been sent to Edward E. Rose to learn the ele-
66
ments of his trade." But while acknowledging the innova-
tive element of O'Neill's techniques, Mencken left the dis-
cussion of O'Neill's techniques and the promotion of O'Neill's
63
64,, .j
Ibid.
re
Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, p. 30.
Mencken, "Fifteen Years" (December, 1923), reprinted
102
67
career to Nathan. And Mencken probably revealed his true
feelings about O'Neill's art when he said, "of all the
dramatists of any importance . . . he interests me the
68
least." Still, the most tangible role Mencken played in
furthering modern American drama was his part in the publica-
tion of three of O'Neill's one-act plays in the Smart Set,
but Nathan should get as much credit as Mencken in this con-
nection. Moreover, it was Nathan who was responsible for
further aiding O'Neill by arranging for the first production
69
of his plays on Broadway.
Mencken's preoccupation with European dramatists was
not unique among critics of that time. American drama was
just beginning to emerge from the social comedies and
romantic plays of the past, and no American dramatists of
any lasting consequence existed during the transition to
realistic and contemporary drama. Consequently, it was not
until O'Neill arrived on the scene that the American theater
was notably influenced by other than the works of such men
r
as Shaw and Ibsen. Mencken, like most of the other critics

of drama, accepted this situation with equanimity and did
not agitate unduly for the development of home-grown dramatists
of similar persuasion. He apparently felt that the increasing
acceptance
67 of realism in the theater would, in itself, be
Mencken, Letters of H. L. Mencken, p. 81.
Îbid. , p. 336. Îbid. , p. 82.
103
sufficient to encourage nascent playwrights. Mencken's

writings on drama indicate that he was primarily interested
in accelerating the acceptance of realistic drama by further
acquainting his readers with the better European dramatists.
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
Mencken is justly remembered as the critic who was most

responsible for freeing American literature from the bonds
of genteelism that had held it for so long. His spectacular
polemical writing, commonly judged to have been his most
effective weapon in this formidable undertaking, has tended
to overshadow his- extensive literary criticism of these
years. His criticism, when commented upon, has generally
been depreciated. He has been called a mere reviewer, and
some have said that he lacked standards, taste, and judgment.
This study has had as its rationale the premise that

Mencken's criticism is more significant than has been
generally recognized. Specifically it has taken the position
that he was a discerning judge of fiction during the twenty
years that he was most active as a critic and that his judg-
ments were not only apt but were based upon specific
criteria. Most of his criticism was devoted to fiction, but
this was consistent with his view that fiction afforded the
author a wider range than drama. And poetry, as Mencken
saw it, was a minor art, one that offered relief from the
realities of existence by casting over them a veil of
illusion and lulling the reader with its melodies.
104
105
Mencken's significance as a critic rests upon his early

recognition and praise of writers who are today considered
among the best of the realistic-naturalistic tradition.
Reviewing books by hundreds of authors, he showed notable
perception in singling out for praise many who have become
eminent. He asserted the genius of Mark Twain at a time
when academic critics considered him a mere entertainer. He
praised Conrad before that writer had an extensive audience.
For the controversial Dreiser, he was mentor, critic, de-
fender, and propagandist. Aside from his recognition of
these major figures, he was a. discerning critic of such
English realists and naturalists as Wells, Bennett, and
Moore. His early praise of Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis,
Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates the
soundness of his taste. All of these writers to a consider-
able degree conformed with his standards of faithfulness to
life and objectivity. However, Dreiser conspicuously fell
short on a third criterion—style. Mencken complained much
'r
of Dreiser's clumsiness and wordiness. Yet he ranked Dreiser

with Twain and Conrad as a modern giant.
Mencken was not the complete critic. The nature of his
reviews, twenty to thirty books considered within the bounds
of some three thousand words, forbade analysis and the dis-
cussion of criteria. Even his essays lack the sustained
analysis of academic criticism. But he did discuss principles
of criticism and standards of fiction in such longer pieces
106
as "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism" and the essay on

Dreiser in his volume of Prefaces; and the judgments made in
his reviews are notably consistent with the criteria enun-
ciated in these longer reviews and essays.
Like many other critics, he found little in contemporary
American drama to interest him. His earliest literary
criticism praised the technical skill with which Shaw and
Ibsen had fashioned their plays and the realism which per-
vaded them. His subsequent comment on the drama continued
to be primarily concerned with European playwrights. How-
ever, he recognized Eugene O'Neill as the first American
playwright to use the new techniques of the theater, and
O'Neill's work was published in both the Smart Set and the
Mercury.
As a critic of poetry, Mencken's range of appreciation
was limited. He enjoyed the romantic and melodic in poetry,
praising the work of Lizette Woodworth Reese and Sara
Teasdale above that of their contemporaries. He appreciated
certain rugged qualities in the verse of Bridges and the
early Pound and extended a limited welcome to the experiments
of the early imagists.
In the main, Mencken's taste was conservative. He
labored to extend the bounds of the permissible in fiction,
but a D. H. Lawrence offended his sensibilities. He could
appreciate the techniques of naturalism and even expression-
ism in the drama, but he was noncommittal on Joyce's stream-
of-consciousness and the innovations of Eliot.
107
Mencken's limitations as a critic are not difficult to

discern. As a judge of poetry, he was bound by a narrow
concept of that art. As a critic of drama, he increased our
awareness of the work of foreign writers but did little to
distinguish the quality of our native playwrights. In com-
parison with our contemporary formalist critics, he was
deficient in analysis of specific works in all of the genres.
Moreover, his taste was too conservative for him to appre-
ciate the innovations in literature that came with Eliot and
Joyce. However, in judging those writers whose break with
tradition was not so pronounced, he demonstrated a singular
ability to distinguish genius. In that most difficult of
tasks—the day-to-day judgment of new writers and new works—
few critics have displayed a higher quality of taste and
judgment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Bode, Carl, Mencken, Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois
University Press, 1969.
Brieux, Eugene, Blanchette and The Escape, edited by H. L.
Mencken, Boston, J. W. Luce and Company, 1913.
Cowley, Malcolm, editor, After the Genteel Tradition,
Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press,
1936.
Dolmetsch, Carl R., The Smart Set: A History and Anthology,
New York, The Dial Press, 1966.
Glicksberg, Charles I., American Literary Criticism, 1900-

1950, New York, Hendricks House, 1952.
Goldberg, Isaac, The Man Mencken, New York, Simon and
Schuster, 1925.
Hornstein, Lillian H. and others, The Reader's Companion to
World Literature, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
Inc., 1956.
Hyman, Stanley E., The Armed Vision, New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1947.
Ibsen, Henrik, The Master Builder, Pillars of Society, Hedda
Gabler, edited by H. L. Mencken, New York, Boni and
Liveright, Inc., 1917.
Manchester, William, Disturber of the Peace; The Life of
2.* ii* Mencken, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1951.
Mencken, H. L., The Bathtub Hoax and Other Blasts and Bravos,
edited by Robert- McHugh, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1958.
, A Book of Prefaces, New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1917
_, George Bernard Shaw; His Plays, Boston,
J. W. Luce and Co., 1905.
108
109
Mencken, H. L., H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection,

edited by James T. Farrell, New York, Vintage Books,
1958.
, H. L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, edited
by William H. Nolte, Ithaca, New York, Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1968.
, H. L. Mencken, The American Scene: A Reader,
edited by Huntington Cairns, New York, Alfred A. Knopf,
1965.
, James Branch Cabell, New York, R. M. McBride
and Co., 1927.
, Letters of H. L. Mencken, selected by Guy J.
Forgue, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.
' h. Mencken Chrestomathy, New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1949."
, Newspaper Days, New York, Alfred A. Knopf,
1941.
, editor, A New Dictionary of Quotations on
Historical Principles, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.
' Pre junices : First Series, New York,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1919.
, Prejudices: Second Series, New York,
, Prejudices: Third Series, New York, Alfred
Knopf, 1922.
, Prejudices: Fourth Series, New York,
r Prejudices: Fifth Series, New York,

, Prejudices: Sixth Series, New York,
, The Vintage Mencken, edited by Alistair
Cooke, New York, Vintage.Books, 1955.
Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Oxford History of the American
People, New York, Oxford University Press, 1965.
110
Nolte, William H., H. L. Mencken, Literary Critic, Middle-

town, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1964.
Nyren, Dorothy, editor, A Library of Literary Criticism, New
York, Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1960.
Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato, translated by W. H. D.
Rouse, New York, The New American Library, 19 56.
Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar
Allan Poe, edited by Hervey Allen, New York, The Modern
Library, 1938.
Smith, Bernard, Forces in American Criticism, New York,
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1939.
Spiller, Robert E. and others, Literary History of the United
States, 3rd. ed., rev., New York, The MacMillan Co.,
1963.
Sutton, Walter, Modern American Criticism, Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963.
Van Nostrand, Albert, Literary Criticism in America, New
York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1957.
Articles
Dolmetsch, Carl R., "H. L. Mencken as a Critic of Poetry,"
Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien, XI (June, 1965), 83-95.
Mencken, H. L., "Books of Verse," American Mercury, VIII
(June, 1926), 251-254.
, "Dreiser in 840 Pages," American Mercury, VII
(March, 1926), 379-381.
, "Edgar Lee Masters," American Mercury, II
(June, 1924), 250-252.
, "Editorial," American Mercury, XII (September,
1927), 34-36.
, "Fiction," American Mercury, XIV (May, 1928),
127.
, "Fiction by Adept Hands," American Mercury,
XVIII (January, 1930), 126-127.
Ill
Mencken, H. L. , "Fiction Good and Bad," American Mercury,

VI (November, 1925), 379-381.
, "Joseph Conrad," The Nation, CXIX (August 20,

1924), 179
, "Man of God: American Style," American

Mercury, ~X (April, 1927), 506-508.
t "The New Humanism," American Mercury, XVIII

(September, 1929), 123-124.
"Poetry," American Mercury, VI (October,

1925), 251-254.
t "The South Astir," Virginia Quarterly Review,

II (January, 1935), 47-60.
f "The Spanish Idea of a Good Time," American

Mercury, XXVII (December, 1932), 506-507.
Sherman, Stuart P., "Beautifying American Literature," The
Nation, CV (November 29, 1917), 593-594.
Wilson, Edmund,.. "The Aftermath of Mencken," New Yorker, XLV
(May 31, 1969), 107-115. —
, "The James Branch Cabell Case Reopened,"

New Yorker, XXXII (April 21, 1956), 140-168.
, "The Literary Worker's Polonius," Atlantic

Monthly, CLV (June, 1935), 674-682

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THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF H.

Dean of the Graduate School

Sellers, Stephen W., The Literary Criticism of H. L.

It is argued that Mencken's early enthusiasm for writers

This study recognizes limitations in Mencken's taste

in that most difficult of tasks--the day-to-day judgment of

Presented to the Graduate Council of the

For the Degree of

Stephen W. Sellers, B.A.

The last few years have brought a spate of books about

Despite the continuing public interest in Mencken and

he possessed the two necessary requirements of a good critic:

^Stanley E. Hyman, The Armed Vision (New York, 1947) ,

This thesis will be developed in more detail in the

emphasis will be placed on three areas of his criticism,

THE CRITICAL CLIMATE

The year 1910 began the first full decade of widespread

"^Cowley, After the Genteel Tradition, p. 5.

accompanied America's increase in population creating a new

critics saw the growth of .naturalism in America as evidence

spontaneity of the humanistic approach. Lewis Gates and

good literature; but where Huneker accepted writers without

out in entertaining prose the European literature, music,

that he considered worth commenting on aside from bemoaning

and Appreciation" (1899), Gates pioneered the attempt to

Irving Babbitt took up the call voiced by Browne11 and

less inclined to believe that American literature contained

(1908) he traced literary trends through a series of six

^Smith, Forces in American Criticism, p. 277.

control while developing his uniquely huraan qualities which

Another subscriber to Brownell's philosophy was Paul

man, describing their relationship and expounding his con-

Stuart P. Sherman was a critic who shifted his own

his earlier humanistic views, Sherman was eventually attracted f

to naturalistic authors such as Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis,

animosity, nor did it sit well with Babbitt and More.

The American tradition, as they saw it, was the linger-

Bourne, Brooks, and Mencken were intent on assuring the

values whose primary purpose was to perpetuate the social

to struggle against the current mistaken depiction of life.

However, Bourne did not offer any concrete alternatives to

spokesman of the movement. Brooks's Wine of the Puritans

ture. To Brooks any writing not meeting the arbitrary

posing as helpful advice. Moving on to an example of

or retreat in the form of a personally imposed idealism.

a more realistic past and the establishment of the freedom

accordance with his philosophy, Bourne had not recognized

influential position of literary editor of Harcourt, Brace

ramifications. In Spingarn's eyes the raging literary

and took as the cornerstone of his philosophy Carlyle's state-

the Baltimore Morning Herald at eighteen and at twenty-five

with the Sun papers and, until his incapacitating stroke in

Encyclopedia, Ben Hur, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Back-

^Carl Bode, Mencken (Carbondale, 1969), p. 22.

seasoned them with selections from minor works.

Kipling was his favorite among the modern English writers.

editing, criticizing plays, writing his own columns—he

Huxley, Shaw, and Nietzsche were major influences in

explicitly, 'Huxley gave order and coherence to my own doubts