CURSE OF LITERATURE

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 82, 6 April 1923, Page 3

CURSE OF LITERATURE

JOURNALISM DENOUNCED

NEWSPAPERS BLAMED FOB INFUENCE.

Every critic has his own list of cusswords. Mild enough thej may sound outeido their context, but the reader coon learns that they are like the comments of Maobeth's followers, who pursued him with "curses, not loud, but deep." In the essays composing "Sidelights on American Literature," Fred Lewis Pattee uses as his ultimate swear, tho term "journalistic."

O. Henry, H. L. Mencken, and Jack London come in for his chief critical denunciations, writes Nancy Barr Mavity, in the "New York Times," and in each instance, having conceded a certain vitality and even genius to the writer in question, Pattee puts him forever among the goats by labelling his product journalism, instead of literature.

These three contemporary idols have been so over-praised, that Pattee is performing a proper service in attempting to place .them in relation to their age, instead of burning joss before them. But in thus placing them, it is plain to be seen that Paiteo blames the age more than the man —and blaming the age is always an easy game. Jutt m no man is a hero to his valet, so no age is heroic in its own eyes. Without doubt, the soholars of Elizabeth's day decried tho jazzy frequenters of the Mermaid Ta.vern —those half-baked actors and playwrights who, it is true, had a certain liveliness that appealed to tho . groundlings, but who misused thoir talents by writing hastily and preferring the quiok ohange of journalism, to the long-time notes of dignified literature. However, Mencken at least is not to be pitied for having a sparring partner capable of giving him es good as he sends, "Life for him," says Pattee, of the pontiff of "The Smart Set," "becomes a hunt for synonyms for 'Damn!' " In Mencken, a» in O. Henry, he finds "good material, but warped somehow beyond all straightening; sharp eyes beyond tlie_ average of sharpness often. But strabisroic even to ludiorousness. The disease of Mencken, the disease of a growing area of our writing generation,. might be diagnosed as contemporaneousness." And this disease, he places among the "occupational disorders" to which the newspaper worker, who casts his blight over our contemporary literature, must inevitably succumb. There are times, of oouiee, when every one of us has felt that the modern newspaper is the worst of all possible worlds. But, after all, a good many writers are not newspaper reporters—who, says Pattee, "sneer at life"—and not all reporters, even those with literary aspirations, as one thinks them over, are quite the dancing devils of ruination that Pattee makes out. • ...

"Imagine"a.journalist writing criticism —imagine Babe Kuth writing epics." Pattee speaks, like one of Kipling's "Just So" animals, "in a voice of dretful scorn" of the "newspaper review" as sharply distinguished from "literary criticism." He agrees with Jules Lemaitre that "criticism that deals with contemporaries is not criticism at all: it is conversation." This dictum desorves more argument than Patteo gives to it. One may at least question whether a writer is necessarily, better understood when the environment that shaped him has become foreign to us; whether a man incapable of seeing his contemporaries in some 1 perspective is any more likely to see predecessors in a true light—unless his "perspective" consists merely in accepting the dictates of previous judges. It should be at least as easy to read a play of Eugene O'Neill freshly and impartially as to read a play of Shakespeare. Pattee himself is at his best when he is passing judgment on his three contemporariei and near-contemporaries. The perspective of time, on which he relies so surely, has relegated Loncfellow to a position where the influences of German romanticism on his verse do not seem to matter much. Bryant, Frenoau. and Poe are other Amerioan poets considered, and the New England influenco gives occasion to the two remaining papers. Pattee quite rightly takes exception to the silly contempt meted out to professors as suoh. "Academic" is no better cuss-word than "journalistic." But he almost parodieß the professorial at its worst when he writes: "Art aUo is truth to the presumption, fundamental at least in civilised lands, that truth is superior to falsehood, that right is superior to wrong, and that actual crime ib never condoned." It is only fair to add that Pattee himself sinks to this level only once, and that his criticism, in the main, Is clear, earnest, and frequently sharpened with an edge of wit.