PREJUDICES SECOND SERIES By H. L. MENCKEN JONATHAN CAPE 11 GOWER STREET LONDON 1921 CONTENTS I THE NATIONAL LETTERS, 9 1. Prophets and Their Visions, 9 2. The Answering Fact, 14 3. The Ashes of New England, 18 4. The Ferment Underground, 25 5. In the Literary Abattoir, 32 6. Underlying Causes, 39 7. The Lonesome Artist, 54 8. The Cultural Background, 65 9. Under the Campus Pump, 78 10. The Intolerable Burden, 87 11. Epilogue, 98 II ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY, 102 III THE SAHARA OF THE BOZART, 136 IV THE DIVINE AFFLATUS, 155 V SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION OF A POPULAR VIRTUE, 172 VI EXEUNT OMNES, 180 VII THE ALLIED ARTS, 194 1. On Music-Lovers, 194 2. Opera, 197 3. The Music of To-morrow, 201 4. Tempo di Valse, 204 5. The Puritan as Artist, 206 6. The Human Face, 206 7. The Cerebral Mime, 208 VIII THE CULT OF HOPE, 211 IX THE DRY MILLENNIUM, 219 1. The Holy War, 219 2. The Lure of Babylon, 222 3. Cupid and Well-Water, 225 4. The Triumph of Idealism, 226 X APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME, 229 1. The Nature of Love, 229 2. The Incomparable Buzzsaw, 236 3. Women as Spectacles, 238 4. Woman and the Artist, 240 5. Martyrs, 243 6. The Burnt Child, 244 7. The Supreme Comedy, 244 8. A Hidden Cause, 245 9. Bad Workmanship, 245 PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES I. THE NATIONAL LETTERS 1 _Prophets and Their Visions_ It is convenient to begin, like the gentlemen of God, with a glance at a text or two. The first, a short one, is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's celebrated oration, "The American Scholar," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on August 31st, 1837. Emerson was then thirty-four years old and almost unknown in his own country:, though he had already published "Nature" and established his first contacts with Landor and Carlyle. But "The American Scholar" brought him into instant notice at home, partly as man of letters but more importantly as seer and prophet, and the fame thus founded has endured without much diminution, at all events in New England, to this day. Oliver Wendell Holmes, giving words to what was undoubtedly the common feeling, hailed the address as the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people, and that judgment, amiably passed on by three generations of pedagogues, still survives in the literature books. I quote from the first paragraph: Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.... Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?