the prohibition demon. He is the man midwife of the naturalistic fiction which makes its bed in the parlor window.
There is not space here to extract the kernel of fact from the bushels of what he calls "pishposh" in which he loves to involve and invalidate all his criticism. I will give but a single illustration. On the soberest page of his book, page 285, he congratulates the young American literatus on the freedom which has been won for him since he, Mr. Mencken, assumed the "martyr's shroud" in 1908; and immediately thereafter he sketches the dreadful condition of American authorship in the period immediately preceding his advent. Before his appearance, he declares, "the American novelists most admired by most publishers, by most readers and by all practising critics were Richard Harding Davis, Robert W. Chambers and James Lane Allen. It is hard indeed, in retrospect, to picture those remote days just as they were. They seem almost fabulous."
Now my animadversions against Mr. Mencken as critic and historian of American letters have been evoked chiefly by the quality which is still regnant in the soberest page of this latest book: I mean his wholly uncritical and grobian callousness about the truth. The "fabulousness" of the decade prior to 1908 Mr. Mencken produces by bringing in H. W. Mabie and ignoring James and Howells, who are, of course, the real way-makers of our realistic fiction; and by bringing in Richard Harding Davis and leaving out Crane's "Red Badge of Courage," 1895; James's "What Maisie Knew," 1897; Frederic's "Damnation of Theron Ware," 1896; Norris's "McTeague," 1899, and "The Pit," 1902; Grant's "Unleavened Bread,"
