Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  The Greek language was the first lost tongue recovered in modern times, and the men who recovered it naturally made as much as they could of the ideas that came with it. Ever since the Renaissance it has been a mark of intellectual distinction to know Greek, though there is no record that knowing it has ever helped any man to think profitable thoughts. That distinction, to be sure, now begins to fade and wear thin, but there was a time, just before the beginning of the current rapid increase of knowledge, when it rose above all other forms of intellectual eminence, and it was during that period that the world was saddled with the exalted view of Greece and the Greeks that still survives. In so far as it is not a mere sentimentality, it is grounded, I believe, upon the scantiness of our records of other peoples, contemporaneous with the Greeks or preceding them. If the history of Greek philosophy were known accurately, it would probably turn out to be no more than an imitation of some earlier philosophy, now forgotten—and maybe abandoned by its inventors as nonsense. In architecture and the other arts, it is certainly absurd to say that the Greeks invented anything. They got the column from the Egyptians, who had perfected it a thousand years before the Parthenon, and they slavishly followed the Egyptians in their neglect of the arch. Their excellent materials were accidental, and in working them they showed no originality. Was the Greek drama really indigenous? I shall believe it when it is proved that the Sanskrit drama was also indigenous, and not an imitation of some Persian, or maybe even Assyrian prototype. Were the Greeks scientists? Then so are the modern chiropractors. What they had of exact knowledge, in fact, was mainly borrowed, and most of it was spoiled in the borrowing. And the Greek religion? The best that one may say of it is that none of the intelligent foreigners who frequented Athens believed in it, and that many of them were jailed, exiled and even put to death for making fun of it. As for the Greek genius for politics, it revealed its true measure in the fact that no Greek government ever lasted for more than a century, and that most of them ended in scandal and disaster.

  Here I make no fatuous attempt to read the Greeks out of court altogether. They were, for their time, an enterprising and progressive people, and they left us an immensely rich heritage, partly of sound ideas and partly of pleasant delusions and superstitions. But we probably owe a great deal more to the Egyptians, and quite as much to the lesser peoples who infested the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, notably the Phoenicians, the earlier Minoans, the Jews, and the forerunners of the later Arbs. The one genuinely solid contribution of the Greeks to human progress lay in their attempt to synthesize and organize whatever knowledge was afloat in the world of their day. This business they achieved with great skill. But out of their own heads they produced little that is valid and important to modern man, save perhaps in the dreams of pedagogues seeking to astonish schoolboys. The Greeks themselves, restored to earth, would laugh at the pretension to the contrary, as they laughed at the Grecomaniac Romans. If they had any virtue above all others, it was the virtue of skepticism. They were, in that department at least, the first of modern men. The barbaric surges and thunders of the Odyssey, in these twilight days of Christendom, are moving only to professors of Greek—which is to say, to men whose opinion on any other subject would be rejected even by their fellow professors—and the enjoyment of Greek tragedy, that unparalleled bore, is confined almost wholly to actresses who have grown too fat for Ibsen; but the ideas of Lucian and Aristophanes still live, and so do those of the Four Hundred.

  War

  From the American Mercury, Sept., 1929, pp.23–24

  WAR naturally sucks in those who can be most profitably spared, and lets go most of those whose talents are really useful. One hears, now and then, of promising young men cut down too soon, but the science of statistics scarcely justifies the accompanying mourning. Let us turn, for example, to the Civil War. In the Union Army, during the four years of the war, there were 2,666,999 men who reached the field, and of this number 110,070 were killed in battle or died of wounds, 199,720 died of disease, and 40,154 perished otherwise—murdered, killed by accident, or done to death in prisons. Of those who were murdered or died of accident or disease, probably 100,000 would have died anyhow. Deducting that number, the total net loss comes to about 250,000. How many men were wounded is not certain, but probably the number ran to at least 1,000,000.

  We don’t know, of course, what the dead men would have done if they had lived, but we may reach some approximation to it by examining the wounded who survived. How many of them, after the war, contributed anything that was genuinely interesting to civilization? Searching the record for weary days and night I can find but three names: those of Major Ambrose Bierce, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Private George Westinghouse. The typical eminentissimo who survived the Civil War was not of this company; he was the shallow political plug, McKinley. All the really important men of the post-Civil War era, all the men who developed and fecundated such culture as we now have, from John D. Rockefeller to Walt Whitman, from Grover Cleveland to William James, from Mark Twain to Cyrus Field, from Andy Carnegie to Mark Hanna, from William Dean Howells to Bronson Howard, from John Fiske to James Russell Lowell, and from Willard Gibbs to Brigham Young—all these men were slackers, and leaped not to the cannon’s roar. The three exceptions that research reveals I have listed. Apply the ratio to those who perished, and it appears that the Civil War cost American Kultur exactly three-fourths of a really valuable man. Call Fitz-James O’Brien, who died of his wounds, the other fourth—and the net loss comes to one man.

  The melancholy conclusion that the science of statistics thus points to is amply confirmed by a study of military history. Of all the arts practised by man, the art of the soldier seems to call for the least intelligence and to develop the least professional competency. Every battle recorded in history appears as a series of almost incredible blunders and imbecilities—always, at least, on one side, and usually, on both. One marvels, reading the chronicles, that any major engagement was ever won. Even the greatest generals—for example, Bonaparte—walk idiotically into palpable traps, and waste thousands of lives getting themselves out. The lesser fry proceed heroically from disaster to disaster, as Burnside did during the Civil War and Joffre during the World War. The simplest problem of their ancient and elemental business flabbergasts them. They seem to be congenitally incapable of reasoning clearly, even when all the facts are before them. And at the enterprise of unearthing those facts they show only the gross and pathetic ineptitude of a second-rate lawyer or a third-rate pedagogue.

  Whenever, at the practise of their art in the field, they confront a problem of any complexity, they have to get help from civilians, i.e., from men not paralyzed by training in their professional numskullery. It was so, as everyone knows, in the war of 1914–18. The great captains on the two sides lay locked in a bloody and horrible embrace until engineers, chemists and press-agents came to their rescue and pried them loose. All the while, behind the lines, they were laboriously drilling their recruits in the archaic marchings and counter-marchings of the Old Dessauer.… Yet the human race, after watching such bunglers perform their gory buffooneries, cheers them when they come home, dazed and empty-headed, and thrusts its highest honors upon them. What a certificate to its judgment, its common sense, its sense of humor, its right to survive on earth!

  A Bad Guess

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 11, 1931. Nations, like men, seldom learn by experience. England made the same mistake again on September 3, 1939, and the United States followed docilely two years later. The consequences are now spread before a candid world

  MOST of England’s appalling troubles today are due to a bad guess: she went into the war on the wrong side in 1914. The theory of her statesmen, in those days, was that, by joining France and Russia, she would give a death-blow to a dangerous rival, Germany, and so be free to run the world. But the scheme failed to work; moreover, it had unexpected and almost fatal results. Not only did Germany come out of the mess a dangerous riv
al still; France also became a rival, and a very formidable one. Worse, the United States was pumped up to immense proportions, and began to challenge England’s control of the world’s markets. The results are now visible: England has three competitors instead of one, and is steadily going downhill. If she had gone into the war on the German side she’d be in a much better situation today. The Germans would be grateful for the help, and willing to pay for it (while the French are not); the French would be down and out, and hence unable to menace the peace of Europe; Germany would have Russia in Europe and there would be no Bolshevik nuisance; England would have all of Siberia and Central Asia, and there would be no Japanese threat and no Indian revolt; and the United States would still be a docile British colony, as it was in 1914. English foreign policy, once so simple and direct, is now confused and irresolute. It confronts three huge problems, all of them probably insoluble—to hamstring and dephlogisticate both France and Germany, to bamboozle the United States (e.g., in the matter of naval “disarmament”), and to keep the colonies and dominions from flying off into space. Yet the English put up monuments to the “statesmen” who got them into this mess. And even taller monuments to King Edward VII, who prepared the way for it by preferring the patchouli of Paris to the malt liquor of Berlin.

  The United States made a similar mistake in 1917. Our real interests at the time were on the side of the Germans, whose general attitude of mind is far more American than that of any other people. If we had gone in on their side, England would be moribund today, and the dreadful job of pulling her down, which will now take us forty or fifty years, would be over. We’d have a free hand in the Pacific, and Germany would be running the whole Continent like a house of correction. In return for our connivance there she’d be glad to give us whatever we wanted elsewhere. There would be no Bolshevism in Russia and no Fascism in Italy. Our debtors would all be able to pay us. The Japs would be docile, and we’d be reorganizing Canada and probably also Australia. But we succumbed to a college professor who read Matthew Arnold, just as the English succumbed to a gay old dog who couldn’t bear to think of Prussian M. P.’s shutting down the Paris night-clubs.

  As for the mistake that the Russians made, I leave it to history.

  Undying Glories

  From the Smart Set, Nov., 1921, p. 36

  THE HAPSBURGS seem to be quite down and out. The archdukes of the house, once so steadily in the newspapers, are now heard of no longer, and the Emperor Karl appears to be a jackass almost comparable to an American Congressman. But what a family in the past! To one member Haydn dedicated the Kaiser quartette, to another Beethoven dedicated the Erzherzog trio, and to a third old Johann Strauss dedicated the Kaiser waltz. Match that record in all human history.

  XIII. STATESMEN

  Pater Patriæ

  From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, pp. 7–8

  IF George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would be for the whole camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and professional patriots! He was the Rockefeller of his time, the richest man in the United States, a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, an exploiter of mines and timber. He was a bitter opponent of foreign entanglements, and denounced their evils in harsh, specific terms. He had a liking for forthright and pugnacious men, and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters and all other such obscurantists. He was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the Republic from them. He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors.

  Inhabiting These States today, George would be ineligible for any office of honor or profit. The Senate would never dare confirm him; the President would not think of nominating him. He would be on trial in the newspapers for belonging to the Money Power. The Sherman Act would have him in its toils; he would be under indictment by every grand jury south of the Potomac; the Methodists of his native State would be denouncing him (he had a still at Mount Vernon) as a debaucher of youth, a recruiting officer for insane asylums, a poisoner of the home. And what a chance there would be for that ambitious young district attorney who thought to shadow him on his peregrinations—and grab him under the Mann Act!

  Abraham Lincoln

  From FIVE MEN AT RANDOM, PREJUDICES:

  THIRD SERIES, 1922, pp. 171–76.

  First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, May, 1920, p.141

  SOME time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. But despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana and the constant discussion of old Abe in other ways, even so elemental a problem as that of his religious ideas—surely an important matter in any competent biography—is yet but half solved. Was he a Christian? Did he believe in the Divinity of Jesus? I am left in doubt. He was very polite about it, and very cautious, as befitted a politician in need of Christian votes, but how much genuine conviction was in that politeness? And if his occasional references to Jesus were thus open to question, what of his rather vague avowals of belief in a personal God and in the immortality of the soul? Herndon and some of his other early friends always maintained that he was an atheist, but the Rev. William E. Barton, one of the best of the later Lincolnologists, argues that this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time—that nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were alive today, would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for me, I still wonder.

  Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has been perceptibly humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus making him fit for adoration in the Y. M. C. A.’s. All the popular pictures of him show him in his robes of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man about to be hanged. There is, so far as I know, not a single portrait of him showing him smiling—and yet he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t? Worse, there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical politician of long experience and high talents, and by no means cursed with idealistic superstitions. Until he emerged from Illinois they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche. Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing alarmed him more than the suspicion that he was an Abolitionist, and Barton tells of an occasion when he actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited until the time was more favorable—until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and more important still, until the political currents were safely running his way. Even so, he freed the slaves in only a part of the country: all the rest continued to clank their chains until he himself was an angel in Heaven.