well as an open demand for the best in the larder, that seldom has been exhibited either this side of the Atlantic or of the Nineteenth Century. The author of Prejudices realizes that to err is human. He knows, also, that critically to forgive is asinine. Therefore he never forgives, never cleans his plate for the sake of good form, never makes pretty farewell speeches about having had a good time. If the food pleases him—as it does occasionally—he eats it at once and holds out his plate for more. If it displeases him, on the contrary—and this happens less occasionally —he rejects it straightway and stormily goes home to bed. And if the world hears promptly of his pleasure, the very stars are made privy to his pain.
There is, as I have said, refreshing honesty in this thunderous approval and denunciation of current American literature. It is honesty, moreover, that has seldom been matched either here or abroad. Poe, grinding his heel in the dust to hollow out a grave for Longfellow, was not more courageous than Mr. Mencken, who has struck down by name any of his contemporaries whom he considers silly, weak, or ephemeral. Nor is his onslaught merely brutal. His bludgeon is fitted with a keen blade. If he lived in the Eighteenth Century and wrote with a quill, he would, one feels, be sharpening it constantly. His opinions are edged with a remarkably penetrating style; and there is weight behind his blow no less certainly than there is a knife in front of his axe-head.
With such critical equipment a man is certain to travel far. That Mr. Mencken has travelled farther in his examination of present-day literatures than any other American, excepting perhaps Mr. Huneker, is a statement which only the timid would end with an interrogation mark and only the blind would not begin at all. That he suffers from a defect, however, which cripples many of his judgements and warps no inconsiderable part of his views is a statement which equally demands the light. And the humour and tragedy of this particular shortcoming are born of the fact that the very evil of Puritanism which Mr. Mencken continually embattles has infected him locally with a disease which, if less dangerous, is no less virulent than the one he is seeking to destroy. It is almost as though, going forth to kill the typhus germ, he had inadvertently contracted malaria of the soul. His actual theories of criticism are sound; and his elucidation of the holy business of critics, at the beginning of the volume, is as compact and forceful an example of zetetical writing
