Americans, by Stuart P. Sherman

Professor Sherman once more coaxing American criticism the way it should go.

Like Benjamin Franklin, one of his heroes, he attempts the invention of a creed that shall “satisfy the professors of all religions, and offend none.”

He smites the marauding Mr. Mencken with a velvet glove, and pierces the obstinate Mr. More with a reproachful look. Both gentlemen, of course, will purr and feel flattered.

That’s how Professor Sherman treats his enemies: buns to his grizzlies.

Well, Professor Sherman, being a professor, has got to be nice to everybody about everybody. What else does a professor sit in a chair of English for, except to dole out sweets?

Awfully nice, rather cloying. But there, men are but children of a later growth.

So much for the professor’s attitude. As for his “message.” He steers his little ship of Criticism most obviously between the Scylla of Mr. Mencken and the Charybdis of Mr. P. E. More. I’m sorry I never heard before of either gentleman: except that I dimly remember having read, in the lounge of a Naples hotel, a bit of an article by a Mr. Mencken, in German, in some German periodical: all amounting to nothing.

But Mr. Mencken is the Scylla of American Criticism, and hence, of American democracy. There is a verb “to menckenize,” and a noun “menckenism.” Apparently to menckenize is to manufacture jeering little gas-bomb phrases against everything deep and earnest, or high and noble, and to paint the face of corruption with phosphorus, so it shall glow. And a menckenism is one of the little stink- gas phrases.

Now the nouveau riche jeune fille of the bourgeoisie, as Professor Sherman puts it; in other words, the profiteers’ flappers all read Mr. Mencken and swear by him: swear that they don’t give a nickel for any Great Man that ever was or will be. Great Men are all a bombastical swindle. So asserts the nouveau riche jeune fille, on whom, apparently, American democracy rests. And Mr. Mencken “learnt it her.” And Mr. Mencken got it in Germany, where all stink-gas comes from, according to Professor Sherman. And Mr.

Mencken does it to poison the noble and great old spirit of American democracy, which is grandly Anglo-Saxon in origin, but absolutely American in fact.

So much for the Scylla of Mr. Mencken. It is the first essay in the book. The Charybdis of Mr. P. E. More is the last essay: to this monster the professor warbles another tune. Mr. More, author of the Shelburne Essays, is learned, and steeped in tradition, the very antithesis of the nihilistic stink-gassing Mr. Mencken. But alas, Mr. More is remote: somewhat haughty and supercilious at his study table. And even, alasser! with all his learning and remoteness, he hunts out the risky Restoration wits to hob-nob with on high Parnassus; Wycherley, for example; he likes his wits smutty. He even goes and fetches out Aphra Behn from her disreputable oblivion, to entertain her in public.

And there you have the Charybdis of Mr. More: snobbish, distant, exclusive, disdaining even the hero from the Marne who mends the gas bracket: and at the same time absolutely preferring the doubtful odour of Wycherley because it is — well, malodorous, says the professor.

Mr. Mencken: Great Men and the Great Past are an addled egg full of stink-gas.

Mr. P. E. More: Great Men of the Great Past are utterly beyond the mobile vulgus. Let the mobile vulgus (in other words, the democratic millions of America) be cynically scoffed at by the gentlemen of the Great Past, especially the naughty ones.

To the Menckenites, Professor Sherman says: Jeer not at the Great Past and at the Great Dead. Heroes are heroes still, they do not go addled, as you would try to make out, nor turn into stink-bombs. Tradition is honourable still, and will be honourable for ever, though it may be splashed like a futurist’s picture with the rotten eggs of menckenism.

To the smaller and more select company of Moreites: Scorn not the horny hand of noble toil: “ — the average man is, like (Mr. More) himself, at heart a mystic, vaguely hungering for a peace that diplomats cannot give, obscurely seeking the permanent amid the transitory: a poor swimmer struggling for a rock amid the flux of waters, a lonely pilgrim longing for the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land. And if ‘P. E. M.’ had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which he is so distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than anything else today keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism is the religion of democracy, consisting of a little bundle of general principles which make him respect himself and his neighbour; a bundle of principles kindled in crucial times by an intense emotion, in which his self-interest, his petty vices, and his envy are consumed as with fire; and he sees the common weal as the mighty rock in the shadow of which his little life and personality are to be surrendered, if need be, as things negligible and transitory.”

All right, Professor Sherman. All the profiteers, and shovers, and place-grabbers, and bullies, especially bullies, male and female, all that sort of gentry of the late war were, of course, outside the average. The supermen of the occasion.

The Babbitts, while they were on the make.

And as for the mighty rocks in weary lands, as far as my experience goes, they have served the pilgrims chiefly as sanitary offices and places in whose shadows men shall leave their offal and tin cans.

But there you have a specimen of Professor Sherman’s “style.” And the thin ends of his parabola.

The great arch is of course the Religion of Democracy, which the professor italicizes. If you want to trace the curve you must follow the course of the essays.

After Mr. Mencken and Tradition comes Franklin. Now Benjamin Franklin is one of the founders of the Religion of Democracy. It was he who invented the creed that should satisfy the professors of all religions, not of universities only, and offend none. With a deity called Providence. Who turns out to be a sort of superlative Mr. Wanamaker, running the globe as a revolving dry-goods store, according to a profit-and-loss system; the profit counted in plump citizens whose every want is satisfied: like chickens in an absolutely coyote-proof chicken-run.

In spite of this new attempt to make us like Dr. Franklin, the flesh wearies on our bones at the thought of him. The professor hints that the good old gentleman on Quaker Oats was really an old sinner. If it had been proved to us, we might have liked him. As it is, he just wearies the flesh on our bones. Religion civile, indeed.

Emerson. The next essay is called “The Emersonian Liberation.” Well, Emerson is a great man still: or a great individual. And heroes are heroes still, though their banners may decay, and stink.

It is true that lilies may fester. And virtues likewise. The great Virtue of one age has a trick of smelling far worse than weeds in the next.

It is a sad but undeniable fact.

Yet why so sad, fond lover, prithee why so sad? Why should Virtue remain incorruptible, any more than anything else? If stars wax and wane, why should Goodness shine for ever unchanged? That too makes one tired. Goodness sweals and gutters, the light of the Good goes out with a stink, and lo, somewhere else a new light, a new Good. Afterwards, it may be shown that it is eternally the same Good. But to us poor mortals at the moment, it emphatically isn’t.

And that is the point about Emerson and the Emersonian Liberation — save the word! Heroes are heroes still: safely dead. Heroism is always heroism. But the hero who was heroic one century, uplifting the banner of a creed, is followed the next century by a hero heroically ripping that banner to rags. Sic transit Veritas mundi.

Emerson was an idealist: a believer in “continuous revelation,” continuous inrushes of inspirational energy from the Over-Soul. Professor Sherman says: “His message when he leaves us is not, ‘Henceforth be masterless,’ but, ‘Bear thou henceforth the sceptre of thine own control through life and the passion of life.’ “

When Emerson says: “I am surrounded by messengers of God who send me credentials day by day,” then all right for him. But he cozily forgot that there are many messengers. He knew only a sort of smooth-shaven Gabriel. But as far as we remember, there is Michael too: and a terrible discrepancy between the credentials of the pair of ‘em. Then there are other cherubim with outlandish names, bringing very different messages than those Ralph Waldo got: Israfel, and even Mormon. And a whole bunch of others. But Emerson had a stone-deaf ear for all except a nicely aureoled Gabriel qui n’avait pas de quoi.

Emerson listened to one sort of message and only one. To all the rest he was blank. Ashtaroth and Ammon are gods as well, and hand out their own credentials. But Ralph Waldo wasn’t having any. They could never ring him up. He was only connected on the Ideal phone. “We are all aiming to be idealists,” says Emerson, “and covet the society of those who make us so, as the sweet singer, the orator, the ideal painter.”

Well, we’re pretty sick of the ideal painters and the uplifting singers. As a matter of fact we have worked the ideal bit of our nature to death, and we shall go crazy if we can’t start working from some other bit. Idealism now is a sick nerve, and the more you rub on it the worse you feel afterwards. Your later reactions aren’t pretty at all. Like Dostoievsky’s Idiot, and President Wilson sometimes.

Emerson believes in having the courage to treat all men as equals. It takes some courage not to treat them so now.

“Shall I not treat all men as gods?” he cries.

If you like, Waldo, but we’ve got to pay for it, when you’ve made them feel that they’re gods. A hundred million American god- lets is rather much for the world to deal with.

The fact of the matter is, all those gorgeous inrushes of exaltation and spiritual energy which made Emerson a great man, now make us sick. They are with us a drug habit. So when Professor Sherman urges us in Ralph Waldo’s footsteps, he is really driving us nauseously astray. Which perhaps is hard lines on the professor, and us, and Emerson. But it wasn’t I who started the mills of God a-grind- ing.

I like the essay on Emerson. I like Emerson’s real courage. I like his wild and genuine belief in the Over-Soul and the inrushes he got from it. But it is a museum-interest. Or else it is a taste of the old drug to the old spiritual drug-fiend in me.

We’ve got to have a different sort of sardonic courage. And the sort of credentials we are due to receive from the god in the shadow would have been real bones out of hell-broth to Ralph Waldo. Sic transeunt Dei hominorum.

So no wonder Professor Sherman sounds a little wistful, and somewhat pathetic, as he begs us to follow Ralph Waldo’s trail.

Hawthorne: A Puritan Critic of Puritanism. This essay is concerned chiefly with an analysis and praise of The Scarlet Letter. Well, it is a wonderful book. But why does nobody give little Nathaniel a kick for his duplicity? Professor Sherman says there is nothing erotic about The Scarlet Letter. Only neurotic. It wasn’t the sensual act itself had any meaning for Hawthorne. Only the Sin. He knew there’s nothing deadly in the act itself. But if it is Forbidden, immediately it looms lurid with interest. He is not concerned for a moment with what Hester and Dimmesdale really felt. Only with their situations as Sinners. And Sin looms lurid and thrilling, when after all it is only just a normal sexual passion. This luridness about the book makes one feel like spitting. It is somewhat worked up-, invented in the head and grafted on to the lower body, like some serpent of supposition under the fig-leaf. It depends so much on coverings. Suppose you took off the fig-leaf, the serpent isn’t there. And so the relish is all two-faced and tiresome. The Scarlet Letter is a masterpiece, but in duplicity and half-false excitement.

And when one remembers The Marble Faun, all the parochial priggishness and poor-bloodedness of Hawthorne in Italy, one of the most bloodless books ever written, one feels like giving Nathaniel a kick in the seat of his poor little pants and landing him back in New England again. For the rolling, many-godded medieval and pagan world was too big a prey for such a ferret.

Walt Whitman. Walt is the high priest of the Religion of Democracy. Yet “at the first bewildering contact one wonders whether his urgent touch is of lewdness or divinity,” says Professor Sherman.

“All I have said concerns you.” But it doesn’t. One ceases to care about so many things. One ceases to respond or to react. And at length other things come up, which Walt and Professor Sherman never knew.

“Whatever else it involves, democracy involves at least one grand salutary elementary admission, namely, that the world exists for the benefit and for the improvement of all the decent individuals in it.” O Lord, how long will you submit to this Insurance Policy interpretation of the Universe! How “decent”? Decent in what way? Benefit! Think of the world’s existing for people’s “benefit and improvement.”

So wonderful says Professor Sherman, the way Whitman identifies himself with everything and everybody: Runaway slaves and all the rest. But we no longer want to take the whole hullabaloo to our bosom. We no longer want to “identify ourselves” with a lot of other things and other people. It is a sort of lewdness. Noli me tangere, “you.” I don’t want “you.”

Whitman’s “you” doesn’t get me.

We don’t want to be embracing everything any more. Or to be embraced in one of Waldo’s vast promiscuous armfuls. Merci, monsieur!

We’ve had enough democracy.

Professor Sherman says that if Whitman had lived “at the right place in these years of Proletarian Millennium, he would have been hanged as a reactionary member of the bourgeoise.” (‘Tisn’t my spelling.)

And he gives Whitman’s own words in proof: “The true gravitation hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comforts — a vast intertwining reticulation of wealth. . . . She (Democracy) asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank and with some craving for literature too” — so that they can buy certain books. Oh, Walt!

A lions! The road is before us.

Joaquin Miller: Poetical Conquistador of the West. A long essay with not much spirit in it, showing that Miller was a true son of the Wild and Woolly West, in so far as he was a very good imitation of other people’s poetry (note the Swinburnian bit) and a rather poor assumer of other people’s played-out poses. A self-conscious little “wild” man, like the rest of the “wild” men. The Wild West is a pose that pays Zane Grey today, as it once paid Miller and Bret Harte and Buffalo Bill.

A note on Carl Sandburg. That Carl is a super-self-conscious literary gent stampeding around with red-ochre blood on his hands and smeared-on soot darkening his craggy would-be-criminal brow: but that his heart is as tender as an old tomato.

Andrew Carnegie. That Andy was the most perfect American citizen Scotland ever produced, and the sweetest example of how beautifully the Religion Civile pays, in cold cash.

Roosevelt and the National Psychology. Theodore didn’t have a spark of magnanimity in his great personality, says Professor Sherman, what a pity! And you see where it lands you, when you play at being pro-German. You go quite out of fashion.

Evolution of the Adams Family. Perfect Pedigree of the most aristocratic Democratic family. Your aristocracy is played out, my dear fellows, but don’t cry about it, you’ve always got your Democracy to fall back on. If you don’t like falling back on it of your own free will, you’ll be shoved back on it by the Will of the People.

“Man is the animal that destiny cannot break.”

But the Will of the People can break Man and the animal man, and the destined man, all the lot, and grind ‘em to democratic powder, Professor Sherman warns us.

A lions! en-masse is before us.

But when Germany is thoroughly broken, Democracy finally collapses. (My own prophecy.)

An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More: You’ve had the gist of that already.

Well there is Professor Sherman’s dish of cookies which he bids you eat and have. An awfully sweet book, all about having your cookies and eating ‘em. The cookies are Tradition, and Heroes, and Great Men, and $350,000,000 in your pocket. And eating ‘em is Democracy, Serving Mankind, piously giving most of the $350,- 000,000 back again. “Oh, nobly and heroically get $350,000,000 together,” chants Professor Sherman in this litany of having your cookies and eating ‘em, “and then piously and munificently give away $349,000,000 again.”

P.S. You can’t get past Arithmetic.