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Full Title
The smart set : a magazine of cleverness, v. LV, no. 4, August 1918.
Contributor
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880-1956. Nathan, George Jean, 1882-1958. O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953. Lindsay, Vivian S., d. 1919.
Date Added
3 September 2014
Format
Journal
Language
English French
Publish Date
1918-08
Publisher
New York : Ess Ess Pub. Co.
Source
Dime Novel and Popular Literature
Topic
Popular literature > Specimens.
About
More Details Permanent Link
Disclaimers
Disclaimer of Liability Disclaimer of Endorsement
OCR
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to answer.
” A su3.PoToMAc PHENOMENON 1 : 5
By H. L.
A GUT in Chicago, the only genuinely
civilized city in the.New -V.Vorld,
‘ theytake the fine arts seriously,
and get into such frets and excitements
. about them-fas are raised nowhere else
save by baseball, murder,‘ political
‘treachery, foreign wars and romantic W
loves. :Boston is too solemn for such
frenzies, and too idiotic; the aesthetic
‘ passion,‘ upthere, hasbeen quenched ‘
by the hose of Harvard; the typical
Boston aesthete is a professorgand
hence an embalmer. As for New York,
"its artistic activities-are dominated by
publishers of bad books, sellers of
eighth-rate (and usually bogus) paint-
ings, and social pushers (often Jews
and always bounders) who patronize
. -music) for the advertising tliatis in it.
The other towns are vacuums.
Hunc-
ker is temporarily in Philadelphia, but ’
not a fluid ounce of Philadelphia is in
Huneker. In San FranciscoAGeorge
‘ ' ‘,2 Sterling is left blooming alone; the
Baptists have chased out all ‘other
friends of beauty and the devil. "St.
Louis? Mention Orrick Johns and Zoe
Akins and you have said all; Sara Teas-
dale has moved to‘New York. Detroit,
Minneapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans,
Baltimore, VV'ashington, ,Los 'Angeles,‘
Denver, thelndiaha towns? To ask is
The life of such fat and
stupid places is absolutely devoid of
artistic interest; a contrapuntist or a
dry-point etcher, dumped into any of 'N
them,‘ would be jailed as a Bolshevik.
And an artistic question, raised publicly
in any of them, would getabout as
much attention as a problem in qua-
ternions, semasiology or honor.
138 C
>- -. ...-.....-,..,. ......-.....
A Wilhelmstrasse?
‘question is simply one of style. 1;
Mencken
:But not in-Chicago‘. Out there they
not onlyproduce artists in. such .num-’"
ber that the produce of all the rest of
the nation is surpassed;,they‘.also de-, A
bate the imysteries andnsnaresof the
bozartwith astounding fervorand co-
piousness. Dramatic criticism, in New
York, is a trade of the chautauqua- -
minded; the most esteemed critics are‘
such pious gushers and sobbers as Clay-
ton Hamilton andhthe late William Win- '
ter. ‘In Chicago the business gets the
best talent of the town, which is the
best talent of , the country. .And so
with music,‘..and- painting, and the
squeezing of mud, and books.
erary supplement that anyone above a
Greek bus boy can read without pain;
Only’.
one New York newspaper prints a lit- .
in Chicago everylast paper has one. In f
New'York the chief music critics are e. E
merely -ambulent card indexes; in Chi-
cago they are musicians. In New York, 7 V
(and Boston no less)-"
But what I started out to do was to T ;
call attention to the uproarious critical '
battle that has been going on in Chi-
cago of late over James Branch‘Cabell
--a battle full of tremendous whoops,
cracks, wallops and deviltries, with
critic pulling the nose of critic,7and
volunteers going over the .top in
swarrris, and the air heavy with ink,‘
ears, typewriters, adjectives, chair legs.
and strophes from the Greek Anthology.
Andtthe question, what is it? -One of , ‘
the Comstocks?
morals-Cabell vs.
V ay. One of "sales-Cabell as a,best-
seller? Nay. One of patriotismgpoli-n
tics? Cabell as a Socialist, ‘a forward-
looker, a wilful one, an agent of the
,Nay' again. ' The
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