Sidelights on American Literature

by Fred Lewis Pattee '88. The Century Company, 1922.

Sidelights on American Literature by Fred Lewis Pattee is a volume of essays about various American waiters ranging from H.L. Mencken to Philip Freneau, and including O. Henry, Jack London, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Longfellow, Bryant, and Poe. Mr. Pattee is a humanist, a Puritan delivered from himself, a sound scholar, and a delightful writer. His book contains detailed and clear analyses, searching and often brilliant estimates—Mencken, for instance, Mr. Pattee sees as "our new literary Amos," Jack London as "the Prophet of the Last Frontier," the sublimation in print of Western energy, virility, enthusiasm, expansiveness, the ability to see things and do things in the big." He draws an interesting parallel between Mrs. Freeman and Hawthorne; he explains reasonably for perhaps the first time in the history of American literature Poe's "Ulalume." But that is not all. Mr. Pattee never deals with books and writers merely; he touches no subject of American literature without giving a living sense of the civilization behind the literature, the shifting the tribal migrations, the drum and stir of life, the enormous forces at work building up an era. All of his treatments of literature have a distinct social cast. Mencken is not just Mencken to Mr. Pattee; he is the spokesman of an age, the age of contemporaneousness, of journalism. In giving us Jack London Mr. Pattee gives us also the Roosevelt regime, the era of the strenuous life. Mrs. Freeman's better work sums up all the survival there is of the darker side of New England Puritanism. It is precisely this quality of enlargement, this power of interpretation so abundantly manifested in Mr. Pattee, that American critical writing has most needed. In addition, Mr. Pattee brings to his work at all times a generous tolerance, a quick interest, a fine power of phrase, and standards of judgment that operate clearly and sanely, never resulting in pronouncements that are annoyingly ex cathedra.

The appraisal of Mencken, "A Critic in C Major," is significant in that it is the first appraisal by a critic of the academic order that gives full recognition to Mencken's actual power and influence in this country to-day. Mr. Pattee does not like Mencken, though he chuckles over him. But, he says, "at forty comes the philosophic mind. Is it too much to hope that a Sainte Beuve may be lurking under this vulgar and furiously erupting Stromboli ? Is it stretching credulity too far to believe that real meat may at last come out of this ferocious eater of men?" Yet when all is said and done, who can ever handle Mencken? Mr. Pattee succeeds better than any who have tried it yet, far better, for instance, than Stuart P. Sherman whose unhappy skirmishes always leave the Baltimore Nietzsche in full possession of his own guns and many of Mr. Sherman's as well. But Mencken has himself gleefully anticipated all of Mr. Pattee's attacks. It is Mencken's way. He has declared again and again, for instance, that the implication that a critic need be constructive is nonsense. That somehow draws the teeth from Mr. Pattee's statement that "There is small variety in the Mencken box of tricks ... it creates nothing: its whole course is destructive."

It is hilariously true, moreover, and the fact must have given Mencken many hours of glee in his Baltimore fastness, that whenever a critic of the more conservative order goes for Mencken, the critic unconsciously falls into something of the Mencken manner himself, a slightly louder tone than usual, a list to port in vocabulary, a straining after the phrase that will make itself heard above the din that is Mencken. "Deceive the pundits," "tempest in a Volstead beer-mug," from Mr. Pattee's article, these are the very stuff of Mencken.

In only one respect does Mr. Pattee's judgment err. He claims too much for Freneau. One is inclined to answer his estimate of Freneau in the same manner that Mr. Pattee answers Mencken: Yes, I am listening. But you are too sweeping in your statement, too laudatory in your judgment. Mr. Freneau wrote much and often vigorously, but, with the exception of a few nature poems, no sound that he made lifts itself to-day above the vocabulary of the eighteenth century.

K.A.R.

Another volume is added to the "Everyday Life' books by the publication of "Comradesin the Great Cause" by Dr. Ozora S. Davis '89, from the Association Press. The book is an exhaustive study of Paul's Epistle to the Philippians and is "especially timely now, when Christian comradeship means more than ever before in practical living." The arrangement is in the well-known form of daily readings, to cover a period of thirteen weeks. Dr. Davis's comments at the end of each chapter, are well characterized as "teeming with human interest and sympathy." In this work as in all his publications, Dr. Davis proves himself a Bible student of a very high order.

H.B.P.

"The College Library" by John Cotton Dana '78 appears in the issue of the Freeman for February 21st. Because of the interest in this article in which Mr. Dana criticises present college libraries it has been reprinted in pamphlet form wth a special fore-word by Mr. Dana.

Hon. Samuel L. Powers '74 is continuing his "Portraits of a Half Century" in the Boston Sunday Herald. In the issue of the Herald for March 18th he has a very interesting article regarding the late Benjamin A. Kimball '54.

Roger Warner '18 is the author of an article "Latch and Door Knocker" in the February issue of Antiques.

"The Yerkes Observatory; a Retrospect of 25 Years" by Edwin Brant Frost '86 has been reprinted for private circulation from the University Record of January, 1923.

"Literary Lights; a Book of Caricatures" by Gene Markey '18 has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.