Second Mencken Chrestomathy (60 page)

A Harvard man feels at ease in Zion, and with sound reason. A Yale man, however he may snort and roar, can never get rid of the scarlet fact that, while he was being fattened for the investment securities business, he was herded into chapel every morning. It rides him through life like a Freudian suppression; he recalls it in the forlorn blackness of the night as a Y.M.C.A. secretary recalls a wicked glass of beer, or the smooth, demoralizing, horrible whiteness of a charwoman’s neck. A Princeton man remembers the Fundamentalists at commencement—flies in amber, spectres at memory’s feast. In all the other great universities there are coeds. In the lesser colleges there are rules against smoking, beadles, courses in Americanization, praying bands. The Harvard man, looking back, sees only a pink glow. His college has not turned out a wowser in 150 years. His accent and necktie are correct. His classmates continue to be worth knowing. No wonder he regards the Republic as his oyster.

From the
Smart Set
, May, 1921, pp. 140–42

On the first page of “American Writers of the Present Day, 1890 to 1920,” by the learned Dr. T. E. Rankin, professor of rhetoric in the University of Michigan, I find the following sentence: “Precisely the same situation
pertains
now.”

Somehow this use of the word interests me. Obviously, a professor of rhetoric in a great university should be an authority on such matters—but just how can a situation
pertain?
I go to the Standard Dictionary for light, and find that the synonyms of
pertain
are
appertain, concern, belong, regard, relate
. I substitute them and obtain:

I turn to page 52 of the same great work, and find the following:

Anxious?
Does the professor mean
eager
? Again, on page 56, what does he mean by the word
pseudo-hallucination
? Pseudo is from the Greek word,
pseudes
, meaning false. Well, how can an hallucination be true? Is it not, by its very nature, a falsity? If so, then we have here a double falsity, a false falsehood. I proceed to page 60. I find: “
One
is ‘playing safe’ when he.…” On page 109 it occurs again: “If
one
will turn to page 239,… 
he
will find …” And on page 126: “
One
cannot refrain from quoting when
he
thinks.…” And so on.

Obviously, the science of rhetoric is developing rapidly at the University of Michigan. Here is a professor who has already thrown overboard the dictionaries and is fast preparing himself to do the same with the grammar-books. Ring Lardner himself is scarcely more disdainful of Harvey and Webster. But that is as far as his rebellious spirit goes. When it comes to moral and aesthetic matters, as opposed to purely lexicographical and grammatical matters, he shows all of the conservatism that befits an awakener of the souls and intellects of youth. His book, indeed, is an almost perfect model of professorial critical theory. It praises Coningsby Dawson’s “Carry On” as the work of “a master of literary style,” it puts Cale Young Rice “high among those who belong to the really tuneful throng,” it hails F. Marion Crawford as “beyond a doubt a man of genius”—and it groups James Huneker with Christopher
Morley and Robert Cortes Holliday, dismisses Dreiser on the ground that he is “uncreative,” calls Hamlin Garland’s “A Son of the Middle Border” a novel, and elaborately avoids any mention whatsoever of James Branch Cabell and Willa Cather. I find myself, indeed, so fascinated by this work that I am unable to put it down; I have already read it three times. Almost every page introduces me to literati of whose existence I have been hitherto unaware: Mrs. Sherwood Bonner MacDowell, Mrs. Louise Clarke Prynelle, Miss Martha Young, Mrs. Annie C. Allinson, Miss Sara Jeannette Duncan, Eric Mackay Yoeman, Hugh J. Maclean, Dr. J. B. Dollard, Prof. J. D. Logan, Arthur S. Bourinot, and so on. And everywhere I find judgments that offer me light and leading. Of all the “young men of America who are now writing novels, Ernest Poole perhaps gives the greatest promise.” Edward Lucas White, it appears, is a man of such talent that “we should have more abiding books” if more of our writers imitated him. Huneker was a laborious fellow, but his style was “jerky, unpleasantly so,” and his “diction often not so much erudite as so farfetched as to be strained to misapplication.” William Allen White’s “A Certain Rich Man” is a “great novel”: “few books are more persuasive—partly because the author devoted three years to the writing of it.” Charles D. Stewart’s “Partners of Providence” is “such a book as the world has waited for ever since Mark Twain’s stories of river life came to the end of their writing.” Edwin Markham and Cale Young Rice are first-rate poets, but Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell are frauds. Richard Hovey spoiled his verse by imitation of “the vagrom spirit of Walt Whitman.” But best of all are the professor’s reticences. Mark Twain, it appears, wrote “Tom Sawyer Abroad” after 1890, but not “The Mysterious Stranger” or “What Is Man?” As for such writers as Montague Glass, Charles G. Norris, Henry B. Fuller, Joseph Medill Patterson, George Ade, Abraham Cahan, E. W. Howe, Vincent O’Sullivan, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis and Zona Gale, they simply do not exist. Sherwood Anderson is condemned to Coventry along with Cabell and Miss Cather. Ezra Pound, John McClure and Eunice Tietjens are unheard of among the poets. The salient American critics of life are Paul Elmer More and Agnes Repplier. There is no mention whatever of any critic of music or painting or
the drama (save only the “unpleasant” Huneker), or of any of the young Liberals, or of any such fellow as Upton Sinclair, Norman Hapgood, Brooks Adams, Ralph Adams Cram, or Brand Whitlock. Among the dramatists there is praise for Charles Rann Kennedy, Charles Kenyon, Marguerite Merington and Percy Mackaye, but not a word either for or against Zoë Akins and Eugene O’Neill.

A curious work, indeed. A perfect specimen of the depths of banality to which the teaching of “English” and “literature” has descended in some of our public seminaries. I do not offer it as the worst that I know of, but as something fairly typical; I have on my desk a book from the University of Nebraska that is ten times as nonsensical. Nor do I expose it to the gaze of the nobility and gentry simply to poke fun at a poor professor—one who, according to “Who’s Who in America,” has pursued the humanities for twenty-four years, and holds two learned degrees, and is a favorite lecturer, and contributes to such gazettes as
Poet-Lore
and the
Homiletic Review
, and has taught rhetoric at the University of Michigan since 1905, and is, moreover, an unyielding patriot and a sound Christian. What interests me is the effect upon the poor yokels who strive heroically for a “liberal” education at such universities as Michigan, and are then belabored and stupefied with such balderdash. Can you imagine the thirst for enlightenment that must be in some of those candidates for the arts degree, and the vast sacrifices that must stand behind their candidacy—remote farmers sweating like slaves for year after year that their sons and daughters may be “educated,” farmwives wearing out their lives in miserable drudgery and loneliness, pennies saved one by one, thousands of little deprivations, hopes cherished through whole generations? And then the result—a bath of bosh. If a professor writes a text-book, I assume that it is for his students: who else would want to read it? Well, imagine a young man or woman outfitted with such a notion of the literature of the country as one finds in the tome of Prof. Rankin. Think of raising chickens and milking cows for twenty years to pay for such an education. I am surely not one to laugh at the spectacle. To me it seems to be tragic.

From the
American Mercury
, March, 1925, pp. 380–81.
A review of T
HE
S
OCIAL
O
BJECTIVES OF
S
CHOOL
E
NGLISH
, by Charles S. Pendleton; Nashville, 1924

Here, in the form of a large flat book, eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches tall, is a sight-seeing bus touring the slums of
pedagogy
. The author, Dr. Pendleton, professes the teaching of English (not English, remember, but the teaching of English) at the
George
Peabody College for Teachers, an eminent seminary at Nashville, in the Baptist Holy Land, and his object in the investigation he describes was to find out what the teachers who teach English hope to accomplish by teaching it. In other words, what, precisely, is the improvement that they propose to achieve in the pupils exposed to their art and mystery? Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic or military?

In order to find out, Pendleton, with true pedagogical diligence, proceeded to list all the reasons for teaching English that he could find. Some he got by cross-examining teachers. Others came from educators of a higher degree and puissance. Yet others he dug out of the text-books of pedagogy in common use, and the dreadful professional journals read by teachers. Finally, he threw in some from miscellaneous sources, including his own inner consciousness. In all, he accumulated 1,581 such reasons, or, as he calls them, objectives, and then he sat down and laboriously copied them upon 1,581 very thin 3×5 cards, one to a card. Some of these cards were buff in color, some were blue, some were yellow, some were pink, and some were green. On the blue cards he copied all the objectives relating to the employment of English in conversation, on the yellow cards all those dealing with its use in literary composition, on the green cards all those having to do with speech-making, and so on. Then he shook up the cards, summoned
eighty professional teachers of English, and asked them to sort out the objectives in the order of appositeness and merit. The results of this laborious sorting he now sets before the learned.

Here is the objective that got the most votes—the champion of the whole 1,581:

I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among the first 200 objectives—200 out of 1,581. Nor do I choose them unfairly; most of those that I have not listed were quite as bad as those I have. But, you may protest, the good professor handed his cards to a jury of little girls of eight or nine years, or to the inmates of a home for the feeble-minded. He did, in fact, nothing of the kind. His jury was very carefully selected. It consisted of eighty teachers of such professional heft and consequence that they were assembled at the University of Chicago for post-graduate study. Every one of them had been through either a college or a normal school; forty-seven of them held learned degrees; all of them had been engaged professionally in teaching English, some for years. They came from Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Toronto, Leland Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern Universities; from Oberlin, De Pauw, Goucher, Beloit and Drake Colleges; from a dozen lesser seminaries of the higher learning. They represented, not the lowest level of teachers of English in the Republic, but the highest level. And yet it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers.

I present Pendleton’s laborious work as overwhelming proof of a thesis that I have maintained for years, perhaps sometimes with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending
to the estate of a childish neèromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing? Here and there, true enough, a competent teacher of English is encountered. I could name at least twenty in the whole country. But it does not appear that Dr. Pendleton, among his eighty, found even one. There is not the slightest glimmer of intelligence in all the appalling tables of statistics and black, zig-zag graphs that he has so painfully amassed. Nor any apparent capacity for learning. The sound thing, the sane thing and the humane thing to do with his pathetic herd of A.B.’s would be to take them out in the alley and knock them in the head.