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H. L. Mencken. Prejudices, Second Series
Prejudices, Second Series
Table of Contents
I. THE NATIONAL LETTERS. 1. Prophets and Their Visions
2. The Answering Fact
3. The Ashes of New England
4. The Ferment Underground
5. In the Literary Abattoir
6. Underlying Causes
8. The Cultural Background
9. Under the Campus Pump
10. The Intolerable Burden
11. Epilogue
II. ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY
III. THE SAHARA OF THE BOZART
IV. THE DIVINE AFFLATUS
V. SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION OF A POPULAR VIRTUE
VI. EXEUNT OMNES
VII. THE ALLIED ARTS. 1. On Music-Lovers
2. Opera
3. The Music of To-morrow
4. Tempo di Valse
5. The Puritan as Artist
6. The Human Face
7. The Cerebral Mime
VIII. THE CULT OF HOPE
IX. THE DRY MILLENNIUM. 1. The Holy War
2. The Lure of Babylon
3. Cupid and Well-Water
4. The Triumph of Idealism
X. APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME. 1. The Nature of Love
2. The Incomparable Buzzsaw
3. Women as Spectacles
4. Woman and the Artist
5. Martyrs
6. The Burnt Child
7
8. A Hidden Cause
9. Bad Workmanship
Отрывок из книги
H. L. Mencken
Published by Good Press, 2019
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What could more brilliantly evoke an image of the eternal Miss Birch, blue veil flying and Baedeker in hand, plodding along faithfully through the interminable corridors and catacombs of the Louvre, the while bands are playing across the river, and young bucks in three-gallon hats are sparking the gals, and the Jews and harlots uphold the traditions of French hig leef at Longchamps, and American deacons are frisked and debauched up on martyrs' hill? The banality of it is really too exquisite to be borne; the lack of humor is almost that of a Fifth avenue divine. One seldom finds in the pronunciamentoes of these dogged professors, indeed, any trace of either Attic or Gallic salt. When they essay to be jocose, the result is usually simply an elephantine whimsicality, by the chautauqua out of the Atlantic Monthly. Their satire is mere ill-nature. One finds it difficult to believe that they have ever read Lewes, or Hazlitt, or, above all, Saintsbury. I often wonder, in fact, how Saintsbury would fare, an unknown man, at the hands of, say, Brownell or More. What of his iconoclastic gayety, his boyish weakness for tweaking noses and pulling whiskers, his obscene delight in slang? …
Is it any wonder that such a young fellow, after one or two sniffs of that prep-school fog, swings so vastly backward that one finds him presently in corduroy trousers and a velvet jacket, hammering furiously upon a pine table in a Macdougal street cellar, his mind full of malicious animal magnetism against even so amiable an old maid as Howells, and his discourse full of insane hair-splittings about vers libre, futurism, spectrism, vorticism, Expressionismus, héliogabalisme? The thing, in truth, is in the course of nature. The Spaniards who were outraged by the Palmerism of Torquemada did not become members of the Church of England; they became atheists. The American colonists, in revolt against a bad king, did not set up a good king; they set up a democracy, and so gave every honest man a chance to become a rogue on his own account. Thus the young literatus, emerging from the vacuum of Ohio or Arkansas. An early success, as we shall see, tends to halt and moderate him. He finds that, after all, there is still a place for him, a sort of asylum for such as he, not over-populated or very warmly-heated, but nevertheless quite real. But if his sledding at the start is hard, if the corrective birch finds him while he is still tender, then he goes, as Andrew Jackson would say, the whole hog, and another voice is added to the raucous bellowing of the literary Reds.
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