Three Early Works (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A Book of Prefaces, Damn! A Book of Calumny, and The American Credo

By H.L. Mencken and Richard J. Schrader

H. L. Mencken presents master styling in A Book of Prefaces (1917), Damn! (1918), and The American Credo (1920). Prefaces is a book of literary criticism containing the essays "Joseph Conrad," "Theodore Dreiser," "James Huneker," and "Puritanism as a Literary Force." He hoped that "they may at least blow a wind through the prevailing fogs, and reveal what is sound and important in some first-rate books." The ensuing intellectual battle energized a generation. Damn! A Book of Calumny contains some of Menckens wittier turns in its forty-nine short essays. It has been mined for anthologies, but it has never before been reprinted as a whole. The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind contains four hundred and eighty-eight articles, co-written by drama critic George Jean Nathan, about American popular belief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430631

H.L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. Mencken is best known for The American Language, a multivolume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States.

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INTRODUCTION

HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN WAS POSSIBLY AMERICA’S GREATEST AND most wide-ranging man of letters, in that he excelled as a journalist, essayist, philologist, satirist, political commentator, magazine editor, and literary critic. The various skills he demonstrated throughout his careers are amply displayed in the three works collected here: A Book of Prefaces (1917), Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), and The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920). They were written at the end of his critical and journalistic apprenticeship, during World War I and its after-math. By this time, he had perfected his inimitable satiric style and had found among the disillusioned an audience for his literary and political theories. Mencken hurled his invective against the complacencies of the Jazz Age, and in the 1920s, as in the previous two decades, he had the most authoritative voice of any American writer. Novelist Richard Wright claimed in his memoir Black Boy that he discovered from A Book of Prefaces how words could be used as weapons. Edmund Wilson, a leading man of letters in the next generation, made the broader claim that Mencken’s public role was the civilized consciousness of modern America.

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) lived his whole life in Baltimore. He graduated valedictorian (1896) from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a high school, and was self-taught thereafter. As a newspaperman he was primarily associated with the Baltimore Sun, from 1906 until 1948 when a debilitating stroke prevented further writing. His columns reached a national audience through syndica tion, making him a well-known critic of war fever, every president from Roosevelt I to Roosevelt II, censorship, the Ku Klux Klan and rampant lynching in the South, Prohibition, and the residual Puritanism which, in his definition, underlay most of America’s problems. He directed his writing to what he called the civilized minority. He had another significant platform in the pages of two influential magazines. Mencken joined The Smart Set as book reviewer in 1908 and, with drama critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958), edited it from 1914 to 1923. They resigned to become founding editors of The American Mercury the next year; Mencken stayed until 1933. Both journals featured his reviews and essays, as well as writing by others that bore his editorial stamp and usually reflected his point of view. His critical task, which is manifest in A Book of Prefaces, was to bring to the foreground the kind of realistic and naturalistic writing that had been developing since the end of the previous century. He advanced authors like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis (and published James Joyce for the first time in America). He recruited women writers and gave more space to minority authors than any other white editor of his time. Mencken’s most famous work is his monumental The American Language, whose first edition (1919) appeared in the same fruitful period as the three books presented here. It was thoroughly revised for three later editions, the last in 1936. The latest version has been reprinted many times, along with two supplements (1945, 1948). It remains an enjoyable and respected survey of the subject. For all that, Mencken may be remembered just as long for the humorous New Yorker reminiscences that were collected into Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943).

Mencken had to suspend many of his journalistic activities because of increasing restrictions on free speech during the lead-up to America’s entry into World War I. His loyalty was suspected because he supported Germany and opposed the calls for the United States to side with Britain and France. When he could no longer print such opinions, he began putting together the four essays that would comprise A Book of Prefaces: Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, James Huneker, and Puritanism as a Literary Force. He did so, as he said in the preface to the first printing, in hopes that they may at least blow a wind through the prevailing fogs, and reveal what is sound and important in some first-rate books. He later wrote that they set forth "my objections to the whole Puritan Kultur in a large and positive way." The challenge was heard around the country, and the ensuing intellectual battle energized a generation. Because of the effect it had on his professional career, Mencken considered Prefaces to be his most important book.

Only marginally connected to the New England culture of colonial times, Puritanism was Mencken’s comprehensive term for what ailed the America he knew. It embraced such things as religious fundamentalism, Prohibition, the world-saving idealism of Woodrow Wilson, book-banning on the one hand, and literary timidity on the other. His chapter on the subject, the longest and most important in the book, assails classic American writers, including William Dean Howells (his immediate predecessor as chief man of letters), for their excessive restraint. Too often, he claims, moralism weakened their writing, and moralists set up hedges against those who would rebel. Puritanism was kept alive by such defenders of the genteel tradition as Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and Mencken’s arch-enemy among the critics, Stuart P. Sherman.

One aim of the chapter on Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was to bring further recognition to this great novelist, whom Mencken had been one of the earliest American critics to promote. The effort was part of his campaign to arouse interest in the new literature and new ideas being produced in Europe. To that end he had written the first book on Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1905) and the first in English on German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1908). He had even co-translated two plays by the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1909), at a time when the American stage was badly in need of models for the new trends in realism.

Like Conrad, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) is praised for not being a moralist. The chapter on him demonstrates why Mencken is still considered one of the best champions and most incisive critics of the novelist. Sister Carrie (1900), the manuscript of which Dreiser presented to Mencken in gratitude for his support, has been thought of as the literary fanfare for the twentieth century. Dreiser’s subsequent fiction realized Mencken’s ideas on what a novelist ought to be saying about the true (meaningless) nature of life, no matter the graceless style. In the fascinating correspondence between the two, published in 1986, one can see them working out their common agenda, despite misgivings on both sides and the occasional need to defend Dreiser against prudish censors. It was an agenda that benefited all subsequent authors who strove to write realistically about the American scene.

James Gibbons Huneker (1857-1921), whom Mencken had known since 1905, fascinated him primarily as a raconteur. Their friendship gave Mencken access to the larger esthetic world, both European and American. Huneker’s lush style, moreover, was a major influence on that of Mencken, who soaked it in over beer at Lüchow’s restaurant in New York City and from reading the extensive criticism of art, music, literature, and culture that flowed from Huneker’s pen. He was a fellow anti-philistine and, for Mencken, that rarest of Americans, a civilized man. In fact, like Conrad and Dreiser, he is praised for his decidedly non-American qualities.

As a defender of Germany, Mencken was limited by the censorship of the times in what he could criticize about America. His choice of essays for the book continued his assault by indirec tion, generally avoiding the political commentary that might have gotten him into trouble. (The United States declared war on April 6, 1917, and Prefaces appeared on October 8.) It was the first of his books to be published by his friend Alfred A. Knopf, who had gone into business just two years before. Their stars would rise together, and Knopf’s famous Borzoi device appeared on posthumously published Mencken works as late as 1995.

Much of the material for the four essays in Prefaces was revised from work that Mencken had done for the Baltimore Sun and The Smart Set. He had been writing about Conrad, Dreiser, and Huneker for years, and his task now was mostly to make judicious selections. The freshest revision stemmed from his recent canvass of American public libraries to find the distribution of Dreiser’s books. (Only the intellectual slums of New Orleans and Providence had no Dreiser books at all.) Puritanism as a Literary Force drew upon a Smart Set series called The American and other articles, but it also contained a great deal that was original. While it was, by his standards, somewhat tempered, Mencken wanted it to be the most headlong and uncompromising attack on American culture ever made, leaving no doubt where he stood on the war and the Wilsonian ideals behind it.

Some tinkering was done at Knopf’s behest to avoid trouble with the censors, but even so a number of reviewers denounced the book for its defense of Dreiser and its assault on the Comstocks, who were anti-vice crusaders in the mold of the leading figure of that endeavor, Anthony Comstock. The most notorious attack was by Stuart P. Sherman, who is discussed in the Dreiser chapter as the moralist turned critic. He had criticized Mencken and Dreiser before, and now, in the Nation of November 29, 1917, he took advantage of the wartime hysteria to assail Mencken’s fondness for European culture and his pro-German stance. Mencken never forgave him--in spite of Sherman’s later change of heart--not because of the critical sparring, which Mencken enjoyed, but because of the ethnic slurs against himself and Dreiser as German-Americans that Sherman employed in this and other pieces.

Such attacks confirmed Mencken in his belief that a strain of Puritanism still infected the national letters. However, not all the reviews were negative, and Prefaces sold well for a book of literary criticism: some 6,300 copies of six Knopf printings, the last in 1928. The second of them was revised, and Mencken wrote new prefaces for the second through fifth printings. Doubleday sold 10,000 more as one-dollar reprints in the late 1920s. The fourth printing, which is reproduced here, was also used for the London issue by Jonathan Cape (1922). Mencken recognized that, for all the hurtful personal attacks, he had gained the kind of authority that his newspaper and magazine reviews alone could not provide. Here and abroad his audience widened, and the discussion he initiated would carry on for years.

Damn! A Book of Calumny was another project in which Mencken assembled and revised material that he had published before. Some of it had appeared in The Smart Set; even more came from pieces he had done for the New York Evening Mail, which had also printed two of his most famous essays: The Sahara of the Bozart (an attack on Southern culture with far-reaching effects) and A Neglected Anniversary (wherein he created the Bathtub Hoax, a fictional history of the bathtub that his later disclaimers have not kept out of standard reference works). His usual practice was to work up an idea as a newspaper article, develop it later for a magazine audience, then rewrite it for a book. After the monograph on Nietzsche in 1908, he did not create a book out of entirely new matter until Treatise on the Gods (1930).

Apart from containing some of Mencken’s wittier turns in its forty-nine short essays, Damn! was an interesting experiment in literary marketing. It was one of two Mencken books published in 1918 by his friend Philip Goodman--the other is the often-reprinted In Defense of Women. Though a newly fledged Knopf author, Mencken kept a promise to Goodman by allowing him to put out these two works.

Goodman’s novel idea was to avoid relying solely on bookstores, for both he and Mencken thought that they were run by idiots. Instead, he would look to places like pharmacies, which were beginning to handle merchandise other than drugs. Mencken observed that he was ahead of his time in this attempt; twenty years later the idea would be a commonplace. But for various reasons, including inadequate advertising, Goodman could not make it work in 1918.

Damn! was published on April 1, 1918, five months before In Defense of Women. One of three titles in the same small format, it was offered to druggists and other retailers at a fifty-percent discount. Goodman promoted it with circulars and a dust jacket that exaggerated its naughtiness. In fact, the front of the jacket contained denunciations of Mencken, not the usual praise-filled blurbs. The ploy did not do much for sales, though it probably increased the hostility of the reviews, which in turn brought further publicity. In the long run, these notices were helpful in calling attention to Mencken’s writing, but Damn! was a financial failure.

Goodman initially blamed the small format, so after the first edition of 1,000 copies (divided bogusly into Second Printing and Third Printing by claims on the title page, according to Mencken) he had the book reset for a second edition in July. There were some revisions, a preface was inserted, and larger type was used, adding about forty pages. The price went up from 90¢ to $1.25. Mencken used the preface to lament the title, which was Goodman’s idea. It has libelled the book, which is moral and reassuring in character, and not only libelled it, but also brought down upon it the indignation of the right-thinking. He noted that, because of the title, the New York Times refused to print more than one ad for it so as not to outrage its subscribers. Mencken continued the joke by claiming that many critics had misrepresented the book, which "is obviously not cynical or immoral or pessimistic, but full of high hope and rectitude, and not strutting and squalling, but extremely polite and pianissimo."

Sales remained sluggish, and Knopf took over the remaining sheets later in the year; he would do the same for In Defense of Women in 1919. (Unlike Knopf, Goodman failed as a publisher, but he later enjoyed success as a theatrical producer.) Knopf reissued the book without Damn! in the title and without the preface, adding a dime to the price. Despite everything, the book sold only about 1,800 copies altogether. While it has been mined for anthologies, it has never before been reprinted as a whole.

When the war ended, so did most of the constraints on Mencken’s method of attack. He no longer had to demonstrate the gullibility of the American booboisie by such indirect means as the Bathtub Hoax. One of the fruits of the postwar environment was Répétition Générale, a department in The Smart Set that he created with co-editor Nathan. It ran from April 1919 until they left the magazine. With an early installment, Mencken and Nathan began the practice of including what they imagined were items of American popular belief, and from these they constructed The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind. Knopf published the book on February 6, 1920.

Of the 488 articles, Mencken contributed about half, and though the long preface (more than half the book) is jointly signed, he wrote all of it. The preface gave Mencken a chance to revenge himself on those who had attacked him for his stance during the war and to elaborate on such perennial Menckenian themes as intolerance and conformity. Here is the satiric voice that would be heard in his writing throughout the rest of the 1920s, including the Prejudices series (1919-1927) and his famous dispatches from the Scopes monkey trial at Dayton, Tennessee (1925). Mencken is once again at odds with a moral and intellectual tradition that stifles non-conformists.

The comic creedal statements (twelve of them claimed by Smart Set author F. Scott Fitzgerald in his copy of the book) together are meant to constitute proof of the credulity of the national mind. After the first edition, twenty-nine comically obscene articles were left over. Mencken knew that the Comstocks would not allow them in the book, so he had them privately printed for his friends in a four-page leaflet, now a collector’s item.

In 1921, Knopf brought out the revised second edition reprinted here; it is enlarged to 869 items. Most of the new ones came from readers, so this was to some extent a national collaboration in the manner of Mencken’s The American Language, which benefited from many specialist and nonspecialist contributions. (Six years later Nathan recycled the items and partially quoted Mencken’s preface in The New American Credo.) The game continued when Mencken, Nathan, and Knopf founded The American Mercury in 1924. One department carried over from The Smart Set was Americana, in which they quoted articles published throughout the nation to demonstrate the absurd doings and beliefs of the American people. If anything, the country came off worse than it did in Credo, because these were not imaginary (if often plausible) items of faith made up by the diabolical editors. Not everyone was amused: the editor of The Saturday Evening Post set up a department that offered contrary examples. Undaunted, Mencken and Nathan assembled two collections in book form (1925, 1926), and the composer Randall Thompson even selected five texts for Americana: A Sequence of Choruses for Five Voices (1932). Others were edited as Mencken’s Americana (2002).

Mencken’s first published books were Ventures Into Verse (1903) and the monographs on Shaw and Nietzsche. His other works in the years before A Book of Prefaces demonstrate the diversity of his interests, and they include a small Nietzsche anthology, a dialogue defending individualism over socialism, a ghost-written guide to baby care, a play, a travel book, and collections of his humor and satire from magazines and newspapers. After the amazing performance already noted in the years 1917-1920 (Prefaces, Damn!, In Defense of Women, American Language, Prejudices: First Series, and American Credo, not to mention Heliogabalus: A Buffoonery in Three Acts, co-written with Nathan), he generally concentrated on literary and social criticism. Ahead lay self-compiled anthologies of his miscellaneous writing in the rest of the Prejudices series and in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949). Less successful were treatises on democracy, religion, and morals. His strength lay in political commentary, including the matchless reports he sent from the quadrennial presidential nominating conventions (1904-1948). Several posthumous anthologies gather up these and other writings, as well as many of the estimated one hundred thousand letters that he wrote. Correspondence was his way of staying in touch with hundreds of writers and with those ordinary people who contributed to The American Language. He stipulated that three autobiographical works be kept sealed until after his death: his Diary (1989), My Life as Author and Editor (1993), and Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work (1994). They exploded like time bombs on an America unused to his comic persona and trained to regard all satire as mean-spirited. Thanks to a new kind of censorious Puritanism, now called political correctness, the memoirs inspired the kind of controversy that Mencken provoked in his lifetime, as he once again stirred up the animals. Readers of the three earlier works presented here will be better prepared to enjoy a master stylist, comedian, and cultural commentator.

Richard J. Schrader is a Professor of English at Boston College, where he specializes in medieval literature, bibliography and textual criticism, and H. L. Mencken. He has published extensively in these areas.

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

THIS FOURTH PRINTING OF A BOOK OF PREFACES OFFERS ME temptation, as the third did, to revise the whole book, and particularly the chapters on Conrad, Dreiser and Huneker, all of whom have printed important new books since the text was completed. In addition, Huneker has died. But the changes that I’d make, after all, would be very slight, and so it seems better not to make them at all. From Conrad have come The Arrow of Gold and The Rescue, not to mention a large number of sumptuous reprints of old magazine articles, evidently put between covers for the sole purpose of entertaining collectors. From Dreiser have come Free, Twelve Men, Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub and some chapters of autobiography. From Huneker, before and after his death, have come Unicorns, Bedouins, Steeple-Jack, Painted Veils and Variations. But not one of these books materially modifies the position of its author. The Arrow of Gold, I suppose, has puzzled a good many of Conrad’s admirers, but certainly The Rescue has offered ample proof that his old powers are not diminished. The Dreiser books, like their predecessors that I discuss here, reveal the curious unevenness of the author. Parts of Free are hollow and irritating, and nearly all of Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub is feeble, but in Twelve Men there are some chapters that rank with the very best of The Titan and Jennie Gerhardt. The place of Dreiser in our literature is frequently challenged, and often violently, but never successfully. As the years pass his solid dignity as an artist becomes more and more evident. Huneker’s last five works changed his position very little. Beduoins, Unicorns and Variations belong mainly to his journalism, but into Steeple-Jack, and above all into Painted Veils he put his genuine self. I have discussed all of these books in other places, and paid my small tribute to the man himself, a light burning brightly through a dark night, and snuffed out only at the dawn.

I should add that the prices of Conrad first editions given on page 56 have been greatly exceeded during the past year or two. I should add also that the Comstockian imbecilities described in chapter 4 are still going on, and that the general trend of American legislation and jurisprudence is toward their indefinite continuance.

H. L. M.

Baltimore, January 1, 1922

A BOOK OF PREFACES

CHAPTER ONE

JOSEPH CONRAD

§ 1

UNDER ALL HIS STORIES THERE EBBS AND FLOWS A KIND OF tempered melancholy, a sense of seeking and not finding . . . I take the words from a little book on Joseph Conrad by Wilson Follett, privately printed, and now, I believe, out of print.¹ They define both the mood of the stories as works of art and their burden and direction as criticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the immense indifference of things, the tragic vanity of the blind groping that we call aspiration, the profound meaning lessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible forces that beset them.

Even in Youth, Typhoon, and The Shadow Line, superficially stories of the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressing sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath the surface. Captain Mac Whirr gets the Nan-Shan to port at last, but it is a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no more than a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fighting one another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is one of disdain, almost one of contempt. So, too, in Youth. A tale of the spirit’s triumph, of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To me its significance, like that of The Shadow Line, is all subjective; it is an aging man’s elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of Victory, an incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm!

Mr. Follett, perhaps with too much critical facility, finds the cause of Conrad’s unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life—his double exile, first from Poland, and then from the sea. But this is surely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must be plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad has been back to Poland, and he is free to return to the ships whenever the spirit moves him. I see no reason for looking in such directions for his view of the world, nor even in the direction of his nationality. We detect certain curious qualities in every Slav simply because he is more given than we are to revealing the qualities that are in all of us. Introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carries the study of man and fate to a point that seems morbid to westerners; he is forever gabbling about what he finds in his own soul. But in the last analysis his verdicts are the immemorial and almost universal ones. Surely his resignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human philosophies and religions seem doomed to come to it at last. Once it takes shape as the concept of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will to not-will. Again, it is fatalism in this form or that—Mohammedanism, Agnosticism . . . Calvinism! Yet again, it is the Out, out, brief candle! of Shakespeare, the Eheu fugaces of Horace, the Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas! of the Preacher. Or, to make an end, it is millenarianism, the theory that the world is going to blow up tomorrow, or the day after, or two weeks hence, and that all sweating and striving are thus useless. Search where you will, near or far, in ancient or modern times, and you will never find a first-rate race or an enlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gave more than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christianity, starting out as glad tidings, has had to take on protective coloration to survive, and today its chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in Herod’s rain-barrel. The sanctified are few and far between. The vast majority of us must suffer in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine grace, so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. Why? There, alas, is your insoluble mystery, your riddle of the universe! . . .

This conviction that human life is a seeking without a finding, that its purpose is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you will see written largely in the work of most great creative artists. It is obviously the final message, if any message is genuinely to be found there, of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at any rate, of the three which show any intellectual content at all. Mark Twain, superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forced itself through his guard in The Mysterious Stranger and What is Man? In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Molière, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the Zola of L’Assomoir, Germinal, La Débâcle, the whole Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of Les Quatres Evangiles, and particularly of Fécondité, turned meliorist and idealist, and became ludicrous.) Or in the Hauptmann of Fuhrmann Henschel, or in Hardy, or in Sudermann? (I mean, of course, Sudermann the novelist. Sudermann the dramatist is a mere mechanician.) . . . The younger men in all countries, insofar as they challenge the current sentimentality at all, seem to move irresistibly toward the same disdainful skepti cism. Consider the last words of Riders to the Sea. Or Gorky’s Nachtasyl. Or Frank Norris’ McTeague. Or Stephen Crane’s The Blue Hotel. Or the ironical fables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt. Or George Moore’s Sister Teresa.

Conrad, more than any of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, is that it is pointless, that Kurtz’s death is as meaningless as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he must be a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable to accept so profound a determinism unadulterated, and so he injects a gratuitous and mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad as a comrade, one of a company gathered under the ensign of hope for common war on despair. With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps argues that his books are based on the axiom of the moral law.² The one notion is as unsound as the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is pre-eminently not a moralist. He swings, indeed, as far from revolt and moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize God. His undoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul he vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moral agnosticism. He neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles and pities. Like Mark Twain he might well say: The more I see of men, the more they amuse me—and the more I pity them. He is simpatico precisely because of this ironical commiseration, this infinite disillusionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow limits of human volition and responsibility . . . I have said that he does not criticize God. One may even imagine him pitying God. . . .

§ 2

But in this pity, I need not add, there is no touch of sentimentality. No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and their naïve ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely his quality of irony, and that irony is no more than a proof of the greater maturity of his personal culture, his essential superiority as a civilized man. It is the old difference between a Huxley and a Gladstone, a philosophy that is profound and a philosophy that is merely comfortable, Quid est veritas? and Thus saith the Lord! He brings into the English fiction of the day, not only an artistry that is vastly more fluent and delicate than the general, but also a highly unusual sophistication, a quite extraordinary detachment from all petty rages and puerile certainties. The winds of doctrine, howling all about him, leave him absolutely unmoved. He belongs to no party and has nothing to teach, save only a mystery as old as man. In the midst of the hysterical splutterings and battle cries of the Kiplings and Chestertons, the booming pedagogics of the Wellses and Shaws, and the smirking at keyholes of the Bennetts and de Morgans, he stands apart and almost alone, observing the sardonic comedy of man with an eye that sees every point and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that sophomoric indignation, that Hyde Park wisdom, that flabby moralizing which freight and swamp the modern English novel. At the centre of his web, says Arthur Symons, sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with a calm and cynical ferocity. . . . He calls up all the dreams and illusions by which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly naked. . . . He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of every vice and crime. He summons before him all the injustices that have come to birth out of ignorance and self-love. . . . And in all this there is no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outside nature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civilization, are equal and indifferent. . . .³

Obviously, no Englishman! No need to explain (with something akin to apology) that his name is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole of noble lineage, with a vague touch of the Asiatic in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in these later days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole point of view. Put into plain language, his doctrine can only fill it with wonder and fury. That mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, certain, indignant; it is as incapable of skepti cism, save as a passing coryza of the spirit, as it is of wit, which is skepticism’s daughter. Time was when this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley and even Thackeray show, but that time was before the Reform Bill of 1832, the great intellectual levelling, the emancipation of the chandala. In these our days the Englishman is an incurable foe of distinction, and being so he must needs take in with his mother’s milk the delusions which go with that enmity, and particularly the master delusion that all human problems, in the last analysis, are readily soluble, and that all that is required for their solution is to take counsel freely, to listen to wizards, to count votes, to agree upon legislation. This is the prime and immovable doctrine of the mobile vulgus set free; it is the loveliest of all the fruits of its defective powers of observation and reasoning, and above all, of its defective knowledge of demonstrated facts, especially in history. Take away this notion that there is some mysterious infallibility in the sense of the majority, this theory that the consensus of opinion is inspired, and the idea of equality begins to wither; in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all. But the notion is not taken away; it is nourished; it flourishes on its own effluvia. And out of it spring the two rules which give direction to all popular thinking, the first being that no concept in politics or conduct is valid (or more accurately respectable), which rises above the comprehension of the great masses of men, or which violates any of their inherent prejudices or superstitions, and the second being that the articulate individual in the mob takes on some of the authority and inspiration of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to set himself up as a soothsayer, so long as he does not venture beyond the aforesaid bounds—in brief, that one man’s opinion, provided it observe the current decorum, is as good as any other man’s.

Practically, of course, this is simply an invitation to quackery. The man of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the domain of applied ethics, is the revived and reinforced Sklavenmoral that besets all of us of English speech—the huggermugger morality of timorous, whining, unintelligent and unimaginative men —envy turned into law, cowardice sanctified, stupidity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoretical field there is an even more luxuriant crop of bosh. Mountebanks almost innumerable tell us what we