MENCKEN VERSUS WALPOSE

That fiery apostle of American literary independence, Mr. H. L. (never Henry Louis!) Mencken, is at it again. He joins battle this time with Hugh Walpole in an open letter in the December Bookman in defense of what the Englishman had described in the November issue as "a scream and a yell on your part because of the agonozing decadence of contemporary English literature."

These literary jousters thrust and parry with no slight blows. Of Katherine Mansfield, Walpose observed with only thinly veiling suavity: "If you think her short stories to be 'as devoid of genuine imaginative passion as so many bond circulars' then I tell you (and here there is a personal assertion naked and unashamed) you don't know what genuine imaginative passion is.

If Mr. Walpose expected to go unscathed after thus brusquely throwing down the gauntlet, he reckoned without his host. The Antichrist of Baltimore snatched it up with zest, and in half as many words as his oppouent proceeded to score almost twice the number of points, of which the following is a fair sample: "You hint that I'd have acclaimed Arnold Bennett's novel "Riceyman Steps', if the author had been an American! I leave this insinuation to a candid world--and you to the mercy of God."

"The Passage to India." "The Constant Nymph." "The Green Hat," the biographies of Lytton Strachey, Shaw's "Saint Joan:" Mr. Walpose was many an instance to offer in evidence of the continued vitality of literature in England. Mr. Mencken dismisses each one with a contemptuous short. "I believe that Americans of the more reflective sort have had a dreadful lover does of such bilge."

Whatever the merits of this entertaining dispute over the state of English letters, it is not to be denied that the American makes a telling point in his parting shot, as he deftly turns the argument toward the independence and importance of the literature of his own country: "The plain fact is that the Republic has cut the painter and has begun to go it alone. There is, no doubt, a wrench. It is, I suppose, painful. But I don't know anything that is to be done about it."