# Americans (Sherman)/Mr. Mencken, the Jeune Fille, and the New Spirit in Letters

* related authors: Henry Louis Mencken.
* sister projects: Wikidata item.
A woman whose husband has made money in the war likes to have her portrait painted and her friends coming in to admire it. So a new public, grown conscious of itself, demands a new literature and a new literature demands a new criticism. Fine gentlemen with a touch of frost above the temples, sitting at ease in quiet old clubs under golden-brown portraits of their ancestors, and turning the pages of the Athenæum or Mr. More's Nation, have seen with disdainful yet apprehensive glance through plate-glass windows the arrival of all three: the formation of a reading public of which they are not a part, the appearance of a literature which they do not care to read, the development of a criticism in which their views are not represented. Since a critic is of no importance except with reference to what he criticizes, you will please bear with me while I bring in the new literature and the new readers. When the stage is properly set, Mr. Mencken will appear.
How shall one indicate the color and spirit of ​it?—this new public now swarming up the avenues of democratic opportunity; becoming prosperous, self-conscious, voluble; sunning itself in the great cities; reaching out greedily to realize its "legitimate aspirations." This latest generation of Americans, so vulgar and selfish and good-humored and sensual and impudent, shows little trace of the once dominant Puritan stock and nothing of the Puritan temper. It is curiously and richly composed of the children of parents who dedicated themselves to accumulation, and toiling inarticulately in shop and field, in forest and mine, never fully mastered the English definite article or the personal pronoun. It is composed of children whose parents or grandparents brought their copper kettles from Russia, tilled the soil of Hungary, taught the Mosaic law in Poland, cut Irish turf, ground optical glass in Germany, dispensed Bavarian beer, or fished for mackerel around the Skagerrack. The young people laugh at the oddities of their forbears, discard the old kettles, the Mosaic Law, the provincial dialect, the Lutheran pastor. Into the new society breaking without cultural inheritance, they derive all their interests and standards from their immediate environment, and gravitate towards refinement through more and more expensive gratifications of the senses.
The prettiest type of this swift civilization—and I must have something pretty to enliven a discourse on current criticism—the prettiest type is the jeune ​fille, who, to modernize the phrase of an old poet, aspires to a soul in silken hosiery and doeskin boots. She springs, this young creature with ankles sheathed and shod like a Virginia deer—ankles whose trimness is, æsthetically speaking, quite the finest thing her family has produced in America—she springs from a grandmother who clumped out in wooden shoes to milk a solitary cow in Sweden. She has no soul, the young thing, but she trusts that the tailor, the milliner, the bootmaker, the manicurist, the hairdresser, and the masseuse can give her an equivalent. Wherever art can work on her surfaces, she is finished. When the car is at the door in the morning—"a distinctive body on a distinguished chassis"—and she runs down the steps with somewhat more than a flash of her silken perfections, she is exquisite, what though the voice is a bit hard and shrill with which she calls out, "H'lo, kiddo! Le's go't Brentano's."
She is indeed coming—the new reader! She will bring home an armful of magazines, smelling deliciously of the press, books with exciting yellow jackets, plays newly translated and imported, the latest stories, the most recent ideas, all set forth in the current fashion, and all, as it will seem to her, about herself, her sort of people, her sort of world, and about the effort which her fair young ego is making to emerge from the indiscriminated mass and to acquire physical form and line congruous with that "distinctive body mounted on a distinguished ​chassis," which bears her with such smooth speed up Riverside Drive. She will have no American literature of the "classical period" in her library; for the New England worthies who produced it wrote before the public of which she is a part began to read or to be noticed in books. The jeune fille, though a votary of physical form, feels within herself an exhilarating chaos, a fluent welter, which Lowell and Longfellow and James and Howells do not, but which her writers must, express.
Therefore, she revels in the English paradoxers and mountebanks, the Scandinavian misanthropes, the German egomaniacs, and, above all, in the later Russian novelists, crazy with war, taxes, hunger, anarchy, vodka, and German philosophy. She does enjoy, however, the posthumous pessimism of Mark Twain—it is "so strong and virile"; and she relishes his pilot oaths—they are "so sincere and unconventional." She savors Mr. Masters' hard little naturalistic sketches of "passion" on Michigan Boulevard; they remind her of her brother. Sherwood Anderson has a place on her shelves; for by the note of revolt in Winesburg, Ohio she recognizes one of her own spirit's deserted villages. Lured by a primitive instinct to the sound of animals roving, she ventures a curious foot into the fringes of the Dreiserian wilderness vast and drear; and barbaric impulses in her blood "answer the wail of the forest." She is not much "intrigued" by the frosty fragilities of imagist verse; but at Sandburg's viking ​salute to the Hog-Butcher of the World she claps her hands and cries: "Oh, boy, isn't it gorgeous!" This welter of her "culture" she plays, now and then, at organizing on some strictly modern principle, such as her father applies to his business, such as her brother applies to his pleasures—a principle of egotistical combat, a principle of self-indulgence, cynical and luxurious. She is not quite happy with the result. Sometimes, I imagine, she wishes that her personal attendants, those handmen and maidens who have wrought so wonderfully with her surfaces, could be set at work upon her interior, so that her internal furnishing and decoration could be brought into measurable concord with the grace and truth of her contours, the rhythm of her hair.
Imagine a thousand jeunes filles thus wistful, and you have the conditions ready for the advent of a new critic. At this point enters at a hard gallop, spattered with mud, H. L. Mencken high in oath—thus justifying the Goethean maxim: Aller Anfang ist schwer. He leaps from the saddle with sabre flashing, stables his horse in the church, shoots the priest, hangs the professors, exiles the Academy, burns the library and the university, and, amid the smoking ashes, erects a new school of criticism on modern German principles, which he traces through Spingarn to Goethe, but which I should be inclined to trace rather to Eckermann.
Of my own inability to interpret modern Germany, however, I have recently been painfully re​minded by an 86-page pamphlet sent to me from Hamburg, with blue-pencil marks kindly inserted by the author, one Hansen—apparently a German-Schleswigian-American who has studied rhetoric in Mr. Mencken's school—inquiring what the masses can possibly know of the real Germany, "so long as the Shermans squat like toads in the portals of the schools and the Northcliffes send their Niagaras of slime through the souls of the English-speaking peoples." I was amused, of course, to find a great lord of the press so quaintly bracketed with an obscure teacher of literature in a Middle Western university as an effective obstacle between the sunlight and Germany. All the same, my conscience was touched; and I remembered with satisfaction that, on the appearance of Mr. Mencken's Prefaces, I made a conscientious effort to tell my countrymen where they should go, namely, to Mr. Mencken, if they desired a really sympathetic presentation of the modern Teutonic point of view with reference to politics, religion, morals, women, beer, and belles-lettres.
On the appearance of Mr. Mencken's new volume, Prejudices—continuing my humble service as guide to what I am not thoroughly qualified to appreciate—I can only say that here I find again the Nietzschean "artistocrat" of yesteryear, essentially unchanged. He is a little sadder, perhaps, since democracy has unhorsed the autocrats; but his skepticism of democracy is unshaken. He is a shade ​more cynical since the extension of women's suffrage; but he is as clear as ever that he knows what girls were made for. He is a little more sober since the passage of the national prohibition act, and a bit less lyrical about the Pilsener-motive in the writings of Mr. Huneker; but, come rain come shine, he still points with pride to a digestion ruined by alcohol. In other respects, former patrons of his school for beautifying American letters will find his familiar manners and customs essentially unaltered.
If we are to have a Menckenian academy, Mr. Mencken shows the way to set it up—with vigor and rigor, with fist and foot, with club and axe. The crash of smashed things, the knocking of heads together, the objurgations which accompany his entrance have a high advertising value, fascinating to all the gamins of the press and attractive to our jeune fille, who will pay for a copy of Prejudices and form her taste upon it. And far be it from me to deny that she may learn something from her heavyhanded disciplinarian. Mr. Mencken, like most men, has his merits, of which it is a pleasure to speak. He is alive; this is a merit in a good man and hardly a defect even in a bad critic. He has a rough, prodding wit, blunted by thrusting at objects which it cannot pierce, but yet a wit. He is passionately addicted to scoffing; and if by chance a sham that is obnoxious to him comes in his way, he will scoff at a sham. He has no inclination to the softer forms of "slush" or to the more diaphanous ​varieties of "pishposh." He has a style becoming a retired military man—hard, pointed, forcible, cocksure. He likes a sentence stripped of baggage, and groups of sentences that march briskly off at the word of command, wheel, continue to march, and, at word of command, with equal precision, halt. He has the merits of an efficient rhetorical drill-sergeant. By his services in pointing out to our fair barbarian that she need not, after all, read Mr. Veblen, she should acknowledge that he has earned the royalty on her copy of Prejudices. He has given her, in short, what she might expect to get from a stiff freshman course in rhetoric.
When he has told her who fits sentences together well and who ill, he has ended the instruction that was helpful to her. He can give her lessons in derision, lessons in cynicism, lessons in contempt; but she was mistress of all these when she entered his school. He can offer to free her from attachment to English and American literary traditions; but she was never attached to these traditions. He will undertake to make her believe that Baptists and Methodists, professors and academicians, prohibition societies and marriage covenants are ridiculous; but she always thought them ridiculous. He is ready to impregnate her mind with the wisdom of "old Friedrich," Stirner, Strindberg, and the rest of the crew; but her mind is already impregnated with that sort of wisdom. "When one has turned away from the false and the soft and the silly," this is the ques​tion she is asking, "where does one go to find true and beautiful things?" She has heard somewhere by chance, poor girl, that one who pursues truth and beauty is delivered from the grosser tyrannies of the senses, escapes a little out of the inner welter, and discovers serenity widening like a fair dawn in the mind, with a certain blitheness and amenity. This is æsthetic liberation.
For one seeking æsthetic liberation there is a canon of things to be thought on which the worldliest of sound critics, Sainte-Beuve, pronounced as clearly and insistently as Saint Paul. The Germans, as the great Goethe explained to the saucer-eyed Eckermann, are "weak on the æsthetic side." Aesthetic appreciation is superficially an affair of the palate, and at bottom an affair of the heart, embracing with elation whatsoever things are lovely. Mr. Mencken has no heart; and if he ever had a palate he has lost it in protracted orgies of literary "strong drink." He turns with anguish from the pure and simple flavors that please children as the first gifts of nature, and that delight great critics as the last achievements of art. His appetite craves a fierce stimulation of sauces, a flamboyance and glitter of cheeses, the sophisticated and appalling ripeness of wild duck nine days old.
He devotes, for example, two pages to leading the jeune fille away from Emerson as a writer of no influence. He spends several more in showing her that Howells has nothing to say. He warns her ​that Mr. Garland's Son of the Middle Border is amateurish, flat, banal, and repellant. He gives a condescending coup de pied to the solider works of Arnold Bennett and singles out for intense admiration a scarlet-lattice scene or so in his pot-boilers. As the author of a work on the American language, over-ambitiously designed as a wedge to split asunder the two great English-speaking peoples, and as an advocate of an "intellectual aristocracy," it has suddenly occurred to him that we have been shamefully neglecting the works of George Ade; accordingly, he strongly commmends to our younger generation the works of Mr. George Ade. But the high light and white flame of his appreciation falls upon three objects as follows: the squalid story of an atrocious German bar-maid by Sudermann; an anonymous autobiographical novel, discovered by Mr. Mencken himself, which exhibits "an eternal blue-nose with every wart and pimple glittering," and is "as devoid of literary sophistication as an operation for gallstones"; and, third and last, the works of Mr. Mencken's partner, Mr. George Jean Nathan, with his divine knack at making phrases "to flabbergast a dolt."
I imagine my bewildered seeker for æsthetic liberation asking her mentor if studying these things will help her to form "the diviner mind." "Don't bother me now," exclaims Mr. Mencken; "don't bother me now. I am just striking out a great phrase. Aesthetic effort tones up the mind with a kind of high ​excitement. I shall say in the next number of the Smart Set that James Harlan was the damnedest ass that America ever produced. If you don't know him, look him up. In the second edition of my book on the American language I shall add a new verb—to Menckenize—and perhaps a new noun, Menckenism. The definition of these words will clear up matters for you, and summarize my contribution to the national belles-lettres. It is beginning to take—the spirit is beginning to spread."
While Mr. Mencken and the jeune fille are engaged in this chat on the nature of beauty, I fancy the horn of a "high-powered" automobile is heard from the street before the Menckenian school. And in bursts Mr. Francis Hackett, looking like a man who has just performed a long and difficult operation under the body of his car, though, as a matter of fact, he has only just completed a splashing, shirtsleeve review for The New Republic. "Let's wash up," cries Mr. Hackett, stripping off his blouse of blue jeans, "and go out to luncheon."
"Where shall we fressen?" says Mr. Mencken.
"At the Loyal Independent Order of United Hiberno-German-Anti-English-Americans," says Mr. Hackett. "All the New Critics will be there. Colum, Lewisohn, Wright, and the rest. I tried to get Philip Littell to come along. He's too gol darn refined. But I've got a chap in the car, from the West, that will please you. Used to run a column in the World's Greatest. Calls Thomas ​Arnold of Rugby 'that thrice-damned boor and noodle.'"
"Good!" Mr. Mencken exclaims. "A Menckenism! A Menckenism! A likely chap!" And out they both bolt.
The jeune fille, with a thoughtful backward glance at Mr. Hackett's blouse, goes slowly down into the street, and, strolling up the walk in the crisp early winter air, overtakes Mr. Littell, who is strolling even more slowly. He is reading a book, on which the first snowflake of the year has fallen, and, as it falls, he looks up with such fine delight in his eye that she asks him what has pleased him.
"A thought," he replies gently, "phrased by a subtle writer and set in a charming essay by a famous critic. Listen: "Où il n'y a point de délicatesse, il n'y a point de littérature."
"That's a new one on me," says the jeune fille.