of the biological type. He celebrated glorious war, like a Prussian professor. He preached the gospel of Herrenmoral. He despitefully assigned women and negroes to the slave class. He emptied dishwater over pretty nearly the whole of American literature, treating with particular ignominy my heroes, the Abolitionists, the Transcendentalists, and the American pioneers of realism. He insulted my grandmother. And I found no compensation for that in his whooping it up for a type of modern German naturalism which had pleased me in my teens but which, when I had found better diet, I had come to loathe.
Mr. Mencken's Fourth Series is still deplorably rich in exulting grobianisms. He rarely faces an adversary, he never argues, he never meets a point, and he never uses one. The only weapons employed by this champion of the civilized minority are bricks and cabbages. But as he hurls these missiles at phantoms and puppets of his own ingenious manufacture, which generally bear no resemblance to the persons whose names he affixes to them, little blood is spilled. Along with these insignificant personal diatribes, he utters much humorous thunder in behalf of universal skepticism and anarchy. In the style with which we have grown quite familiar, he preaches contumacy toward God, the laws, the clergy, the politicians, the courts, the police, the professors, and the farmers; all this as the mark of a civilized minority. He denounces religion, poetry, and romantic love as lies and delusions which can impose on no man of intelligence after the age of thirty. He proclaims the bootlegger the hero of contemporary civilization; and he avows a yearning to see "the whole human race gently stewed," and thereby happy.
Of "cultural progress" in the Mid-West and the
