Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Art and Sex

  From THE BLUSHFUL MYSTERY, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES,

  1919, pp. 197–98.

  First printed in the Smart Set, May, 1919, p. 54

  ONE of the favorite notions of the Puritan mullahs who specialize in pornography is that the sex instinct, if suitably repressed, may be “sublimated,” as they say, into idealism, and especially into esthetic idealism. That notion is to be found in all their books; upon it they ground the theory that the enforcement of chastity by a huge force of spies, stool pigeons and police would convert the Republic into a nation of moral esthetes. All this, of course, is simply pious fudge. If the notion were actually sound, then all the great artists of the world would come from the ranks of the hermetically repressed, i.e., from the ranks of old maids, male and female. But the truth is, as everyone knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No moral man—that is, moral in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.

  Offspring

  From IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 67–68

  THE WOMAN Who has not had a child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more than a little ridiculous. She is in the position of a man who has never stood in battle; she has missed the most colossal experience of her sex. Moreover, a social odium goes with her loss. Other women regard her as a sort of permanent tyro, and treat her with ill-concealed disdain, and deride the very virtue which lies at the bottom of her experiential penury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect among women for virginity per se. They are against the woman who has got rid of hers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost anything intrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad bargain, and one that materially diminishes the sentimental respect for virtue held by men, and hence one against the general advantage and well-being of the sex. In other words, it is a guild resentment that they feel, not a moral resentment. Women, in general, are not actively moral, nor, for that matter, noticeably modest. Every man, indeed, who is in wide practise among them is occasionally astounded and horrified to discover, on some rainy afternoon, an almost complete absence of modesty in some women of the highest respectability.

  Sex Hygiene

  From THE BLUSHFUL MYSTERY, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, p. 197.

  First printed in the Smart Set, April, 1919, p. 52

  EVEN the most serious and honest of the sex hygiene tomes are probably futile, for they are all founded upon a pedagogical error. That is to say, they are all founded upon an attempt to explain a romantic mystery in terms of an exact science. Nothing could be more absurd: as well attempt to interpret Beethoven in terms of mathematical physics—as many a fatuous contrapuntist, indeed, has tried to do. The mystery of sex presents itself to the young, not as a scientific problem to be solved, but as a romantic itch to be accounted for. The only result of the current endeavor to explain its phenomena by seeking parallels in botany is to make botany obscene.

  Eugenics

  From EDUCATION, PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES, 1922, p. 259

  FIRST-RATE men are never begotten by Knights of Pythias; the notion that they sometimes are is due to an optical delusion. When they appear in obscure and ignoble circles it is no more than a proof that only an extremely wise sire knows his son. Adultery, in brief, is one of nature’s devices for keeping the lowest orders of men from sinking to the level of downright simians: sometimes for a few brief years in youth, their wives and daughters are comely–and now and then the baron drinks more than he ought.

  The Double Standard

  From the same, p. 114. First printed in the Smart Set, Jan., 1923, p. 55

  THE DOUBLE standard of morality will survive in this world so long as a woman whose husband has been lured away is favored with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

  The Supreme Comedy

  From APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME, PREJUDICES:

  SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 244–45

  MARRIAGE, at best, is full of a sour and inescapable comedy, but it never reaches the highest peaks of the ludicrous save when efforts are made to escape its terms—that is, when efforts are made to loosen its bounds, and so ameliorate and denaturize it. All projects to reform it by converting it into a free union of free individuals are inherently absurd. The thing is, at bottom, the most rigid of existing conventionalities, and the only way to conceal the fact and so make it bearable is to submit to it philosophically. The effect of every revolt is merely to make the bonds galling, and, what is worse, obvious. Who are happy in marriage? Those with so little imagination that they cannot picture a better state, and those so shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hopeless rebellion.

  Woman as Realpolitiker

  From REFLECTION ON HUMAN MONOGAMY PREJUDICES:

  FOURTH SERIES, 1924, p. 113

  WOMEN in general are far too realistic to have any respect for so-called ideas. One seldom hears of them suffering and dying from any of the bogus Great Truths that men believe in. When a woman is on good terms with her husband she is quite willing to accept his idiotic theorizings on any subject that happens to engage him, whether theological, economic, epistemological or political. When one hears of a Republican man who has a Democratic wife, or vice versa, it is always safe to assume that she has her eye on a handsomer, richer or more docile fellow, and is thinking of calling up a lawyer.

  After-Thoughts

  Mainly from notes hitherto unpublished

  IN every theologian there is a larval Torquemada, in every politician there are hopes of a Hitler, and in every wife there are vague glints and rumblings of Ruth Snyder.…

  Every man, at some time or other in his life, plays the scoundrel to some woman. The decentest man imaginable has done it only once.…

  Women’s dislike of men, like the dislike of Englishmen for Americans, is sharpened by a mingling of envy and contempt. Men’s dislike of women, like the dislike of Americans for Englishmen, is diluted by a sneaking suspicion that they are actually superior.…

  The natural emotion of a normal young man after a conquest is not remorse, but elation. He is delighted by the triumphant demonstration of his manhood, and takes a natural mammalian joy in the fact that he has been accepted as a sexual object. In all probability, the normal girl feels much the same. Remorse requires a period of incubation, precisely like that of the possible bacteriological effects of looseness.…

  The other day, having my shoes shined, I was forced to listen to the old song, “Love Me, and the World is Mine!” on the professor’s radio. Some day I should like to hear from a man who, having been loved in 1905 or thereabout, is still full of confidence that the world is his.…

  One of the incentives to marriage is the desire for property, which is a subdivision of the craving for power. A husband, to the average woman, is very valuable property. So, to the average man, is a wife. No other domestic animal is so useful, or so greatly gratifies the vanity of the owner.

  Romantic Interlude

  From IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 207–09

  IT is the close of a busy and vexatious day—say half past five or six o’clock of a Winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hands, sits a woman not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed—above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks—of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of: books, music, dress, men, other women. No politics. No business. No theology. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious—but remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of
her eyebrow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep—but only for an instant. At once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Then to sleep again—slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.

  I ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful? The sensation of falling asleep is to me the most delightful in the world. I relish it so much that I even look forward to death itself with a sneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and made doubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I match this situation against any that you can think of. It is not only enchanting, it is also, in a very true sense, ennobling. In the end, when the lady grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been genuinely, completely and unregrettably happy.

  Apologia

  From the same, pp. 209–10

  A MAN is inseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a dog is inseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in everything he says and does, but they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses the majestic mystery of woman. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in her actual presence, so he puts on a pathetic and unescapable clownishness when he essays to dissect her in the privacy of the laboratory. There is no treatise on woman by a man that is not a stupendous compendium of posturings and imbecilities. There are but two that show even a superficial desire to be honest – “The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage,” by Sir Almroth Wright, and this one. Wright made a gallant attempt to tell the truth, but before he got half way through his task his ineradicable donkeyishness as a male overcame his scientific frenzy as a pathologist, and so he hastily washed his hands of the business, and affronted the judicious with a half-baked and preposterous work. Perhaps I have failed too, and even more ingloriously. If so, I am full of sincere and indescribable regret.

  1I see nothing in the Kinsey Report to change my conclusions here. All that humorless document really proves is (a) that all men lie when they are asked about their adventures in amour, and (b) that pedagogues are singularly naïve and credulous creatures.

  IV. RELIGION

  The Cosmic Secretariat

  From HIGH AND GHOSTLY MATTERS, PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES,

  1924, pp. 61–65.

  First printed in the American Mercury, Jan., 1924, pp. 75–76

  THE ARGUMENT from design, once the bulwark of Christian apologetics, has been shot so full of holes that it is no wonder it has had to be abandoned. The more, indeed, the theologian seeks to prove the wisdom and omnipotence of God by His works, the more he is dashed by the evidences of divine incompetence and stupidity that the advance of science is constantly turning up. The world is not actually well run; it is very badly run, and no Huxley was needed to labor the obvious fact. The human body, very cunningly designed in some details, is cruelly and senselessly bungled in other details, and every reflective first-year medical student must notice a hundred ways to improve it. How are we to reconcile this mixture of finesse and blundering with the concept of a single omnipotent Designer, to whom all problems are equally easy? If He could contrive so efficient and durable a machine as the human hand, then how did He come to make such botches as the tonsils, the gallbladder, the ovaries and the prostate gland? If He could perfect the elbow and the ear, then why did He boggle the teeth?

  Having never encountered a satisfactory—or even a remotely plausible—answer to such questions, I have had to go to the trouble of devising one myself. It is, at all events, quite simple, and in strict accord with all the known facts. In brief, it is this: that the theory that the universe is run by a single God must be abandoned, and that in place of it we must set up the theory that it is actually run by a board of gods, all of equal puissance and authority. Once this concept is grasped the difficulties that have vexed theologians vanish, and human experience instantly lights up the whole dark scene. We observe in everyday life what happens when authority is divided, and great decisions are reached by consultation and compromise. We know that the effects at times, particularly when one of the consultants runs away with the others, are very good, but we also know that they are usually extremely bad. Such a mixture, precisely, is on display in the cosmos. It presents a series of brilliant successes in the midst of an infinity of failures.

  I contend that my theory is the only one ever put forward that completely accounts for the clinical picture. Every other theory, facing such facts as sin, disease and disaster, is forced to admit the supposition that Omnipotence, after all, may not be omnipotent—a plain absurdity. I need toy with no such blasphemous nonsense. I may assume that every god belonging to the council which rules the universe is infinitely wise and infinitely powerful, and yet not evade the plain fact that most of the acts of that council are ignorant and foolish. In truth, my assumption that a council exists is tantamount to an a priori assumption that its acts are ignorant and foolish, for no act of any conceivable council can be otherwise. Is the human hand perfect, or, at all events, practical and praiseworthy? Then I account for it on the ground that it was designed by some single member of the council—that the business was turned over to him by inadvertence or as a result of an irreconcilable difference of opinion among the others. Had more than one member participated actively in its design it would have been measurably less meritorious than it is, for the sketch offered by the original designer would have been forced to run the gauntlet of criticisms and suggestions from all the other councillors, and human experience teaches us that most of these criticisms and suggestions would have been inferior to the original idea—that many of them, in fact, would have had nothing in them save a petty desire to maul and spoil the original idea.

  But do I here accuse the high gods of harboring discreditable human weaknesses? If I do, then my excuse is that it is impossible to imagine them doing the work universally ascribed to them without admitting their possession of such weaknesses. One cannot imagine a god spending weeks and months, and maybe whole geological epochs, laboring over the design of the human kidney without assuming him to have been moved by a powerful impulse to express himself vividly, to marshal and publish his ideas, to win public credit among his fellows—in brief, without assuming him to be egoistic. And one cannot assume him to be egoistic without assuming him to prefer the adoption of his own ideas to the adoption of any other god’s. I defy anyone to make the contrary assumption without plunging instantly into clouds of mysticism. Ruling it out, one comes inevitably to the conclusion that the inept management of the universe must be ascribed to clashes of egos, i.e., to spites and revenges, among the gods, for any one of them alone, since we must assume him to be infinitely wise and powerful, could run it perfectly. We suffer from bad stomachs simply because the god who first proposed making a stomach aroused thereby the ill-nature of those who had not thought of it, and because they proceeded instantly to wreak that ill-nature upon him by improving, i.e., botching, his work. We must reproduce our species in the familiar arduous, uneconomic, indecent and almost pathological manner because the god who devised the excellent process prevailing among the protozoa had to be put in his place when he proposed to extend it to the Primates.

  The Nature of Faith

  From the same, pp. 65–76

  MANY years ago, when I was more reckless intellectually than I am today, I proposed the application of Haeckel’s biogenetic law—to wit, that the history of the individual rehearses the history of the species—to the domain of ideas. So applied, it leads to some superficially startling but probably quite sound conclusions, for example, that an adult poet is simply an individual in a state of arrested development—in brief, a sort of moron. Just as all of us, in utero, pass through a stage in which we are tadpoles, and almost indistinguishable from the tadpoles which afterward become frogs, so all of us pa
ss through a stage, in our nonage, when we are poets. A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply a donkey: his development has been arrested even anterior to that of the tadpole. But a man of fifty who still writes poetry is either an unfortunate who has never developed, intellectually, beyond his teens, or a conscious buffoon who pretends to be something that he isn’t—something far younger and juicier than he actually is.

  At adolescence large numbers of individuals, and maybe even most, have similar attacks of piety, but that is only saying that their powers of perception, at that age, outrun their knowledge. They observe the tangled and terrifying phenomena of life, but cannot account for them. Later on, unless their development is arrested, they gradually emerge from that romantic and spookish fog, just as they emerge from the hallucinations of poetry. I speak here, of course, of individuals genuinely capable of education—always a small minority. If, as the Army tests of conscripts showed, nearly 50 per cent. of American adult males never get beyond the mental development of a twelve-year-old child, then it must be obvious that a much smaller number get beyond the mental development of a twelve-year-old child, then it must be obvious that a much smaller number get beyond the mental development of a youth at the end of his teens. I put that number, at a venture, at 10 per cent. The remaining 90 per cent. never quite free themselves from religious superstitions. They may no longer believe it is an act of God every time an individual catches a cold, or sprains his ankle, or cuts himself shaving, but they are pretty sure to see some trace of divine intervention in it if he is struck by lightning, or hanged, or afflicted with leprosy or syphilis.