Critics and Pedestals
July 23, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL CRITICS AND PEDESTALS TT IS difficult to imagine Madison Square Garden ¦*¦ filled with an excited crowd watching two hostile groups of scientists pummeling each...
...It is curious to observe that as Mencken grew older the fight centred almost entirely in the words...
...Mencken...
...second, that their opponents are an assemblage of mythopeic nitwits addicted to "truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, one-tenthtruths, whole-cloth lies, mangled quotations, misrepresentative examples, distorting paraphrases, omitted contexts...
...The things he was combating grew fewer and steadily less literary...
...For example: the genuine value of humanism lies in its ability to oppose errors, while its worth as an incentive to creative effort must be quoted at pressent as near zero...
...Hypotheses triumph over one another without making anybody do more than learn the intricacies of the latest one...
...But when the contemporary United States produces as good a critic as Bremond, or as good a poet as Robert Bridges, it will be because the doctrine of criticism has given way to the art of criticism...
...That may not be possible in a country where the convert to something or other is the most native of products...
...Who knows but that it might even accomplish a little good nowadays...
...Is there any chance for a more objective—possibly a more urbane—conception of the whole matter...
...Now it seems to an impartial observer of these phenomena that one grave danger impends...
...And so Babbitt never succeeded in impressing either a new writer or an idea upon his generation...
...Grant the usefulness of the humanists and of their traditionalism...
...The thesis is a dual one: first, that "in power of thought, in breadth of scholarship, in force of presentation, it is being generally recognized that Babbitt and More operate on a plane far above any comparable work in English today and the equal of any in the world...
...By comparison the tactics of the other fighter of the same epoch, Professor Babbitt, had almost the opposite effect...
...Somehow one cannot imagine Emily Dickinson thumbing the pages of Rousseau and Romanticism, or Agnes Repplier waiting for the plaudits of Mr...
...This last named militancy is for us the central point...
...Here the vocabulary had mass and displacement power but virtually no appeal...
...In both cases this indifference seems to have done no great harm...
...Seward Collins, editor of the Bookman and ardent convert to humanism, would seem to us the very man to act as armorer and generalissimo...
...In the June number of his magazine, Mr...
...Mencken, Brooks, Bourne, Mumford inter aliis...
...It is nevertheless impossible for any wholly unbiased person to believe that all wisdom and every sound intuition have been gobbled up by a professor of Romance languages at Harvard...
...Fighting tactics reappeared in American literary journalism with Mr...
...A militaristic attitude is in constant danger of weariness— or, to apply the point to criticism specifically, of ruining the bore of the doctrinal musket by firing too long and steadily...
...Inside the domain of education, however, the things he fought gave way increasingly to his uncompromising broadsides...
...You may well say that urbanity suffers from not being sufficiently martial...
...The elective principle, for instance, has never enjoyed good health since Babbitt's treatises trounced it...
...One should like to examine into it a little, but even so it is interesting and primarily militant...
...The proof of this rather highly spiced pudding is extracted from the writings of the opposition—Messrs...
...His criticism had the effect not of railroading bad authors to the morgue but of making some—not necessarily good—authors popular...
...But if things continue to move as they do now in the land of American criticism, it is fair to anticipate at least an occasional bout between a humanist and his adversary...
...and if the effectiveness of Mencken has lain in the business of making elbow room for favorite new authors, his ability to correct their mistakes or manners is wofully lacking...
...Indeed, the laboratory is almost frighteningly urbane...
...Possibly the disciples of Professor Babbitt will add the martial virtues to their list, and go abroad with bludgeons—there's nothing modern about a bludgeon...
...Mencken and almost immediately became modish...
...Collins presents the first of two articles outlining the history of recent criticism...
...Can it be true that women, characteristically the less belligerent sex, have outdistanced men in our letters through sheer abstinence from critical trenches and bombs...
...July 23, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL CRITICS AND PEDESTALS TT IS difficult to imagine Madison Square Garden ¦*¦ filled with an excited crowd watching two hostile groups of scientists pummeling each other over such a matter as a theory of light...
...and the total result of Babbittism has been the relative demolition of sundry notions which were once current...
...If one is no longer able to believe that Mencken can keep on making the right kind of elbow room, or that Professor Babbitt can continue indefinitely as a significant party of the minority, the outlook for both is hardly interesting...
...While Mencken was snarling at the professors, the number and salaries of these increased—and their work was published extensively in the American Mercury...
...In short: the total result of Menckenism (which need not be limited to one man) has been the popularizing and promotion of certain writings...
...When a disturbance does occur (as in the recent diverting Glozel affair), it is because the evidence lies beyond the domain of test-tubes and formulas...
...The boys all liked his vocabulary as much, or more, than old-fashioned Democrats had enjoyed the congressional diction of pitchfork Ben...
...despatching uproarious Bohemians and rebels...
...These limitations are of the most serious importance because they are characteristic of American literature as a whole...
...The power of urbanity resides in the fact that it is an antidote against believing in any such incongruous possibilities...
...It doubtless does induce the best French and English criticism, that of Saintsbury and Bremond, to deal with letters and art in the same spirit of seeking enjoyment as is assumed by the citizen interested in golf or rosebuds...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 12
