The dinner proved to be like most dinners of its kind—a glorious opportunity for saccharine drool at the expense of a great name. Appreciation and love of an artist—a poet—are highly commendable qualities if practiced in private, if put into proper print. It is the same as with love of a woman. But to stand up in a public place, to shed tears of ecstasy, wave one’s arms, pull at one’s hair and strike at one’s bosom—these are, as they always have been, the slobbering methods of egotistical mediocrity. It is simply a prostituting of the emotions.
Mediocrity is not insensible to art. It is very probable that the Rev. Preston Bradley, who insists he is a reformed clergyman, really likes Walt Whitman, feels thrilled with the reading of him. But the joy the Rev. Bradley derives from reading Walt in his library is not enough for him. In fact, it is not a joy at all. It is an irritation. Give the Rev. Bradley an opportunity to show what he thinks of Walt Whitman, to stand up on his feet before three hundred and fifty sympathetic souls and prove what a keen sense of taste and an advanced instinct of culture he (Rev. Bradley) possesses by yawping:
“I love Whitman, I adore Whitman. He is this to me. He is that to me—”
—then and not till then does the Rev. Bradley feel the real joy of appreciation for “good old, dear old, wonderful old Walt.” Give the Rev. Bradley a decent chance to platitudinize, attitudinize, and blatitudinize, and the love he bears old Walt oozes from him in dewy sighs and briny words.
Do not imagine that I am violently indignant with the Rev. Bradley, or wish the reader to be, for his insincerity. It is indeed one of his best qualities. By being insincere, by having no actual ground for his ecstacy, the Rev. Bradley must, perforce, pay a great deal of attention to what he says. He is free to pick out the best words, the best pose, the most arresting and perhaps enlightening point of view. I say he is free to do this, but of course he doesn’t. It is not the fault of his insincerity, however. If the Rev. Bradley were an artist he would profit by it and be great. But why all this talk about such a person as the Rev. Bradley? Surely not because he is deserving of careful censure. The reason is that there were at least three hundred male and female Rev. Bradleys listening to him, slobbering in silence.
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).