And now the next division of mediocrity. Mr. Clarence Darrow was another of the talkers. Mr. Darrow sneered. Mr. Darrow sneered at Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Dante, Landor, Whittier, Tennyson, Milton, Kipling, and Heine because they didn’t write as good old Walt wrote. Because they wore fetters in their art and insisted on making the last word in the first line rhyme with the last word in the third line. They were weak, ignoble creatures, these copybook writers, said Mr. Darrow; they insisted on using a singular subject with a singular predicate and believed that a violation of such procedure was a sin. One of the things you learn in your school text books on physics is that a gentleman by imposing a pencil-point before his eye can obscure his vision of the Colossus. The idea seems apropos in the case of Mr. Darrow. Mr. Darrow by imposing his soul upon the figures of the world’s big men can obscure them entirely for himself and evidently his sympathizers. After he had concluded three hundred and fifty persons, every one present so far as I could see except my friend K—— and myself, stood up and sneered with Mr. Darrow. They passed him a rising resolution of love and cheered him three times, omitting, however, the customary tiger. The greatest trouble with Mr. Darrow was his sincerity. He didn’t slobber any more than a public speaker has to in order to have a public to speak to. But his sneers were deep and earnest. They were entirely intellectual, the intellectual essence of mediocrity. All of us sneer, of course. The sneer is the one great American characteristic. When I told a man in the office in which I work that I had attended a Walt Whitman dinner he sneered at me. “Fourflushers,” he said. “I can’t see how you put that highbrow stuff over. A lot of long-haired, flea-ridden radicals, ain’t I right? I wouldn’t let my wife associate with a bunch like that.” (This is my office friend’s highest conception of manly virtue,—a thoroughly American one,—being careful of whom his wife associates with.) Then my office friend went on to assert that Whitman was undoubtedly an immoral, not to say degenerate, party, that he “got by with his stuff because it was raw,” and that everybody who professed any admiration for him was a suspicious character and one he “would think twice about before inviting to his home” (where his wife is). It is rather a complicated matter, this sneering business; and after attending a Walt Whitman dinner I don’t know whose sneers disgust me more, Mr. Darrow’s or my friend’s. They are both, however, identical in spirit, the spirit of mediocrity and sincerity when sincerity becomes, as it most always does, the cloak for ignorant convictions and bigoted fanaticism.