Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Women, in fact, are indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they are in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular and preferably bogus martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek.

  The moment she finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her own security or to the wellbeing of the helpless creatures under her protection—say a child or a husband—she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a male extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has been on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the bar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of a barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her within bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the jury may not be unduly aroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as is commonly assumed, because the male jurymen fall in love with them, but simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful, implacable and without qualms.

  What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obvious in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious controversy with a woman, say in the department of finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed through a dangerous and hair-raising experience. Women not only bite in the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dental reach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that they will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is so unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to improve my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper in a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defense, almost invariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical, that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses.

  Many more men than women go insane, and many more married men than single men. The fact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to find out what goes on, year in and year out, behind the doors of apparently happy homes. A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honoré de Balzac long ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla’s efforts to play the violin.

  Women survive the tragi-comedy only by dint of their great capacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that often they deceive even themselves; the average woman’s contentment, indeed, is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must be innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wonders that so few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison their husbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make it out; the death-rate among husbands is very much higher than among wives. More than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an acquaintance who died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in the eyes of the inconsolable widow.

  The Lady of Joy

  From the same, pp. 186–92

  THE PROSTITUTE is disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable to the kind of woman who engages in it, but because she is currently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity, against her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually unsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the women who practise it, and that the prostitute commonly likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a waitress for anything in the world.

  The notion to the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of professional reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latter in order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in prison, questioned by teetotalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal female intelligence is under the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes her; all the recurrent gabble about white slaves comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice in the courts. A physician without patients is a bitter critic of the American Medical Association. And when a clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution he almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in Holy Writ.

  Even the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, than the virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater variety of men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. Some years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that time certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I live undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and some of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for advice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. This truth was to the effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career, not in the morgue but at the altar of God, and that those who remained unmarried often continued in practise for ten, fifteen and even twenty years; and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed, that fully eighty per cent. married, and that they almost always got husbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town’s richest banker—that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a high-toned brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she
was a grande dame of great dignity.

  Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably superior to men of the prostitute’s own class—say her father and brothers—and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is often rather romantic. I well remember observing, during my collaboration with the vice-crusaders aforesaid, the delight of a lady of joy who had attracted the notice of a police lieutenant; she was intensely pleased by the idea of having a client of such haughty manners, such brilliant dress, and what seemed to her to be so dignified a profession.

  This weakness is not confined to the abandoned, but runs through the whole female sex. The woman who could not imagine an illicit affair with a wealthy soap manufacturer or even with a lawyer finds it quite easy to imagine herself succumbing to an ambassador or a duke. There are very few exceptions to this rule. In the most reserved of modern societies the women who represent their highest flower are notoriously complaisant to royalty. And royal women, to complete the circuit, not infrequently yield to actors and musicians, i.e., to men radiating a glamor not encountered even in princes.

  A Loss to Romance

  From THE BLUSHFUL MYSTERY, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES,

  1919, pp. 199–200.

  First printed in the Smart Set, Feb., 1916, p. 155

  THE AMERICAN puella is no longer naïve and charming; she goes to the altar of God with a learned and even cynical glitter in her eye. The veriest school-girl of today knows as much as the midwife of 1885, and spends a good deal more time discharging and disseminating her information. All this, of course, is highly embarrassing to the more romantic and ingenuous sort of men, of whom I have the honor to be one. We are constantly in the position of General Mitchener in Shaw’s one-acter, “Press Cuttings,” when he begs Mrs. Farrell, the talkative charwoman, to reserve her confidences for her medical adviser. One often wonders, indeed, what women now talk of to doctors.

  I do not object to this New Freedom on moral grounds, but on purely esthetic grounds. In the relations between the sexes all beauty is founded upon romance, all romance is founded upon mystery, and all mystery is founded upon ignorance, or, failing that, upon the deliberate denial of the known truth. To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek discus-thrower or an ordinary young woman for a goddess. But how can this condition of mind survive the deadly matter-of-factness which sex hygiene and the new science of eugenics impose? How can a woman continue to believe in the honor, courage and loving tenderness of a man after she has learned, perhaps by affidavit, that his hemoglobin count is 117%, that he is free from sugar and albumen, that his blood pressure is 112/79 and that his Wassermann reaction is negative? Moreover, all this new-fangled frankness tends to dam up, at least for civilized adults, one of the principal well-springs of art, to wit, impropriety. If women, continuing their present tendency to its logical goal, end by going stark naked, there will be no more poets and painters, but only dermatologists.

  The Balance Sheet

  From REFLECTIONS ON HUMAN MONOGAMY, PREJUDICES:

  FOURTH SERIES, 1924, p. 123

  MARRIAGE, as everyone knows, is chiefly an economic matter. But too often it is assumed that its economy concerns only the wife’s hats; it also concerns, and perhaps more importantly, the husband’s cigars. No man is genuinely happy, married, who has to drink worse whiskey than he used to drink when he was single.

  Compulsory Marriage

  From IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 90–94.

  First printed in the New York Evening Mail, Feb. 6, 1918

  IN the days when I was a great deal more the revolutionary than I am now, I proposed the abolition of sentimental marriage by law and the substitution of pairing by the common hangman. This plan, if adopted, would have several plain advantages. For one thing, it would purge the serious business of marriage of the romantic fol-de-rol that now corrupts it, and so make for the peace and happiness of what is, technically speaking, the human race. For another thing, it would work against the process which now selects out those men who are most fit, and so throws the chief burden of paternity upon the inferior, to the damage of posterity.

  The hangman, if he made his selections arbitrarily, would try to give his office permanence and dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet with public approbation, i.e., men obviously of the soundest stock and talents, i.e., the sort of men who now habitually escape. And if he made his selection by the hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out of a hat, or by any other such method of pure chance, that pure chance would fall indiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper orders would thus lose their present comparative immunity. True enough, a good many men would endeavor to influence him privately to their own advantage, and it is probable that, like any other public official, he would occasionally succumb, but it must be plain that the men most likely to prevail in that enterprise would not be philosophers, but politicians, and so there would be some benefit to the race even here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy loss when a Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an ambassador or Prime Minister dies childless, but when a Kant goes to the grave without leaving sons behind him there is a detriment to all the generations of the future.

  Many other theoretical advantages might be mentioned, but the execution of the scheme is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also by a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at least offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite its unfavorable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose the substitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle for husbands for the plain reason that every woman is convinced, and sometimes rightly, that her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangman or the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favorable to her opportunities. And men would oppose it because it would restrict their liberty. This liberty, of course, is largely imaginary. In its common manifestation, it is no more, at bottom, than the privilege of being bamboozled and made a mock of by the first woman who stoops to essay the business. But none the less it is quite as precious to men as any other of the ghosts that their vanity conjures up for their enchantment. They cherish the notion that unconditioned volition enters into the matter, and that under volition there is not only a high degree of sagacity but also a touch of the daring and the devilish. A man is often almost as much pleased and flattered by his own marriage as he would be by seducing a duchess. In the one case, as in the other, his emotion is one of triumph. The substitution of pure chance would take away that soothing unction.

  The present system, to be sure, also involves chance. Every man realizes it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which he humbly whispers: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” But that chance has a sugar-coating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion; it shows less stark and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald hazard of the die. Thus men prefer it, and shrink from the other. In the same way, I have no doubt, the majority of foxes would object to choosing lots to determine the victim of a projected fox-hunt. They prefer to take their chances with the dogs.

  Cavia Cobaya

  From REFLECTIONS ON HUMAN MONOGAMY, PREJUDICES:

  FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 117–18.

  First printed in the Smart Set, Aug., 1920, p. 59

  I FIND the following in Theodore Dreiser’s “Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub”:

  Does the average strong, successful man confine himself to one woman? Has he ever?

  The first question sets an insoluble problem. How are we, in such intimate matters, to say what is the average and what is
not the average? But the second question is easily answered, and the answer is, He has. Here Dreiser’s curious sexual obsession simply led him into absurdity. His view of the traffic of the sexes remained the native one of an ex-Baptist nymph in Greenwich Village. Did he argue that Otto von Bismarck was not a “strong, successful man”? If not, then he should have known that Bismarck was a strict monogamist—a man full of sin, but always faithful to his Johanna. Again, there was Thomas Henry Huxley. Again, there was William Ewart Gladstone. Yet again, there were Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson, Louis Pasteur, Martin Luther, Helmuth von Moltke, Stonewall Jackson, Robert Browning, William T. Sherman, Sam Adams, … I could extend the list to pages.… Perhaps I am unfair to Dreiser. His notion of a “strong, successful man” may have been, not such a genuinely superior fellow as Bismarck or Bach, but such a mere brigand as Yerkes or Jim Fisk. If so, he was still wrong. If so, he ran aground on John D. Rockefeller.