public, I have always regarded these ethnological speculations as a morass full of will-o'—the wisps which were not worth chasing. On the one occasion when I did treat the subject respectfully—in a war tract of 1918—I dismissed Anglo-Saxonism as a banner of preposterous absurdity, and argued that the only banner under which the allied nations could possibly unite was the flag of mankind. The pure Anglo-Saxon, the white, blond, Protestant Nordic, has never been an object of my reverence. He never, as such, occupied ten minutes of my attention till I gave a course of lectures to prove my ancient conviction that in English literature at least he does not exist. Mr. Mencken, on the other hand, revels in ethnology, as he proves by his wild ramblings among the Celts and Saxons in this volume; and he does assert the existence among us, in very small numbers, of the pure Anglo-Saxon.
I snatch at this blond Nordicism of his to explain those characteristics of his work which least captivate me. The pure, unmodified Anglo-Saxon cannot be altogether like Heine. As Taine and others describe the Anglo-Saxon, he is a big white bulk of grobianism—a hard fighter, a hard eater, a hard drinker, a hard boaster, reverencing women but keeping them in the kitchen—a man, in short, with no sentiment or nonsense about him. When I first made acquaintance with Mr. Mencken's work, his juvenile addiction to Kipling and the American Navy and his long immersion in Friedrich Nietzsche had brought all his pure, elemental Anglo-Saxonism, including his Ur-Germanic grobianism, to the surface. In those days he uttered little soft stuff about "the civilized minority." His saving remnant was a hunting pack of horny-hearted supermen. He professed himself a Federalist. He was an atheist
