THE GADFLIES CAGED

Those two American redoubtables, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who several years ago rescued the Smart Set from the devastating popularity it suffered as an all fiction magazine, have recently thrown it back to the masses who feed on fiction with this parting sting: "The Smart Set becomes an all-fiction magazine as it was when America's most popular monthly."

Their fountain pens are not done jabbing, however. Under the protecting wing of Alfred A. Knopf who has befriended and encouraged many to whom smug society turned a deaf ear and an unseeing eye, they have started a new magazine, The American Mercury. While in the Smart Set, perhaps to keep a fire in the editorial office, they were forced at times to pander to the tastes of readers who demanded undisturbing fiction, in their newest venture with a publisher like Knopf behind them they need serve neither fiction nor soothing copy of any kind, but may scratch and sting to their heart's content.

That they intend to give ample play to their vitriolic pen is evidenced by the writers they have selected to aid them. Carl Van Doren, Theodore Dreiser, James Gibbons Hunneker, "a man who because of his official position cannot sign his name," and a member of the staff of the extinct New York Call (Socialist)--all of them with some bone to pick with "nice people"--have contributed to the first number. Although the magazine will be a review, according to its editors "like every other monthly review the world have ever seen," it will be a review, as was the Repetition Generale in the Smart Set, seen through and colored by the editor's glasses. Indeed, a warning to this effect is given in the foreword: "the nobility and gentry are cautioned that they are here in the presence of no band of passionate altruists . . . The editors are committed to nothing save this--to keep to common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible."

In this move these two crusading spirits have brought comfort to those respectable souls who encountered most shocking statements in a chance perusal of the Smart Set. Now they need fear no such attacks upon their righteousness for the gadflies are all safely caged in one magazine.