Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  The Emperor of Wowsers

  From PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 87–90.

  A review of ANTHONY COMSTOCK: ROUNDSMAN OF THE LORD, by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech; New York, 1926.

  First printed in the New York Herald Tribune, March 6, 1927

  In an appendix to this amusing and instructive work, Mr. Broun states the case against Comstockery in a neat, realistic and unanswerable manner, but the book itself is by no means a philippic against old Anthony. On the contrary, it deals with him in a very humane and even ingratiating way. And why not? He was, in point of fact, a man of manifold virtues, and even his faults showed a rugged, Berserker quality that was sneakingly charming. It is quite impossible, at this distance, to doubt his bona fides, and almost as difficult, despite his notorious extravagances, to question his essential sanity. Like all the rest of us in our several ways, he was simply a damned fool. Starting out in life with an idea lying well within the bounds of what most men would call the rational, he gradually pumped it up until it bulged over all four borders. But he never departed from it altogether; he never let go his hold upon logic; he never abandoned reason for mere intuition. Once his premisses were granted, the only way to escape his conclusions was to forsake Aristotle for Epicurus. Such logical impeccability, as all connoisseurs must know, is very common among theologians; they hold, indeed, almost a monopoly of it. The rest of us, finding that our ratiocination is leading us into uncomfortable waters, give it the slip and return to dry land. But not the theologians. They have horribly literal minds; they are less men than intellectual machines. I defy any one to find a logical flaw in their proofs of the existence of Hell. They demonstrate it magnificently and irrefutably. Do multitudes of wise men nevertheless deny it? Then that is only because very few wise men have any honest belief in the reality of the thing that the theologians and other logicians call truth.

  Mr. Broun, in his appendix, tries to find holes in Anthony’s logic, but it turns out to be far from easy: what he arrives at, in the end, is mainly only proof that a logician is an immensely unpleasant fellow. Turn, for example, to a typical and very familiar Comstockian syllogism. First premiss: The effect of sexual images, upon the young, is to induce auto-erotism. Second premiss: the effects of auto-erotism are idiocy, epilepsy and locomotor ataxia. Ergo, now is the time for all good men to put down every book or picture likely to evoke sexual images. What is wrong with all this? Simply that Mr. Broun and you and I belong to a later generation than Anthony’s, and are thus skeptical of his premisses. But let us not forget that they were true for him. His first came out of the hard, incontrovertible experience of a Puritan farm-boy, in executive session behind the barn. His second was supported, when he was getting his education, by the almost unanimous medical opinion of Christendom. And so his conclusion was perfect. We have made no progress in logic since his time; we have simply made progress in skepticism. All his grand truths are now dubious, and most of them are laughed at even by sucklings.

  I think that he himself had a great deal to do with upsetting them. The service that he performed, in his grandiose way, was no more than a magnification of the service that is performed every day by multitudes of humble Y.M.C.A. secretaries, evangelical clergymen, and other such lowly fauna. It is their function in the world to ruin their ideas by believing in them and living them. Striving sincerely to be patterns to the young, they suffer the ironical fate of becoming horrible examples. I remember very well, how, as a boy of ten, I was articled to the Y.M.C.A.: the aim was to improve my taste for respectability, arid so curb my apparently natural flair for the art and mystery of the highwayman. But a few months of contact with the official representatives of that great organization filled me with a vast loathing, not only for the men themselves, but also for all the ideas they stood for. Thus, at the age of eleven, I abandoned Christian Endeavor forevermore, and have been an antinomian ever since, contumacious to holy men and resigned to Hell. Old Anthony, I believe, accomplished much the same thing that the Y.M.C.A. achieved with me, but on an immeasurably larger scale. He did more than any other man to ruin Puritanism in the United States. When he began his long and brilliant career of unwitting sabotage, the essential principles of Comstockery were believed in by practically every reputable American. Half a century later, when he went upon the shelf, Comstockery enjoyed a degree of public esteem, at least in the big cities, half-way between that enjoyed by phrenology and that enjoyed by homosexuality. It was, at best, laughable. It was, at worst, revolting.

  So much did one consecrated man achieve in the short span of his life. I believe that it was no mean accomplishment. Anthony managed it, not because there was any unusual ability in him, but simply because he had a congenital talent for giving shows. The fellow, in his way, was a sort of Barnum. A band naturally followed him, playing in time to his yells. He could not undertake even so banal a business as raiding a dealer in abortifacient pills without giving it the melodramatic air of a battle with a brontosaurus. So a crowd always followed him, and when he made a colossal ass of himself, which was very frequently, the fact was bruited about. Years of such gargantuan endeavor made him one of the national clowns—and his cause one of the national jokes. In precisely the same way, I believe, such gaudy zanies as the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday are ruining the evangelical demonology in the Bible Belt. They make so much uproar that no one can fail to notice them. The young peasants, observing them, are gradually enlightened by them—unintentionally, but none the less surely. The men themselves are obviously charlatans; ergo, their ideas must be fraudulent too. What has been the net effect of the Scopes trial, with its solemn martyrdom of William Jennings Bryan? Its chief effect seems to be that societies of young atheists are now flourishing in all the Southern colleges. Has the study of Darwin been put down? Far from it. Darwin is now being read below the Potomac, and by the flower of Christian youth, as assiduously as “Only a Boy” used to be read in New York in the great days of Anthony’s historic offensive against it.

  Comstockery, of course, still lives, but it must be manifest that its glories have greatly faded. There is, anon, a series of raids and uproars, but they soon pass, and the work of the Devil goes on. It would be hard to imagine Anthony taking orders from district attorneys, or going into amicable conference with his enemies (and God’s), or consenting to the appointment of joint committees (mainly made up of obvious anti-Puritans) to discover and protect the least dirty among the dirty plays of Broadway; he would have raided them all, single-handed and alone. His heirs and assigns are far milder men, and hence, I sometimes fear, more dangerous. Their sweet reasonableness is disarming; it tends to conceal the fact that they are nevertheless blue-noses at heart, and quite as eager to harry and harass the rest of us as Anthony was. Those opponents who now parley with them had better remember the warning against making truces with Adam-Zad. They may end by restoring to Comstockery some of its old respectability, and so throw us back to where we were during the Grant administration. I sound the warning and pass on. It will take, at best, a long time, and I’ll be beyond all hope or caring before it is accomplished. For Anthony’s ghost still stalks the scenes of his old endeavors, to plague and palsy his successors. His name has given a term of opprobrium to the common tongue. Dead, and—as Mr. Broun and Miss Leech so beautifully suggest, an angel with harp, wings and muttonchops—he is yet as alive as Pecksniff, Chadband or Elmer Gantry.

  Well, here is his story, done fully, competently, and with excellent manners. There is much in it that you will not find in the earlier biography by Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, for Trumbull wrote for the Sunday-schools, and so had to do a lot of pious dodging and snuffling. The additional facts that Mr. Broun and Miss Leech set forth are often very amusing, but I must add at once that they are seldom discreditable. Old Anthony was preposterous, but not dishonest. He believed in his idiotic postulates as devotedly as a Tennessee Baptist believes that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake. His life, as he saw it, was one of sa
crifice for righteousness. Born with a natural gift for the wholesale drygoods trade, he might have wrung a fortune from its practice, and so won an heroic equestrian statue in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Perhaps there were blue days when regret crept over him, shaking his Christian resolution. His muttonchop whiskers, the stigma and trademark of the merchant princes of his era, had a pathetic, Freudian smack. But I don’t think he wobbled often. The Lord was always back of him, guiding and stimulating his fighting arm. So he was content to live in a drab suburb on the revenues of a second-rate lawyer, with his elderly, terrified wife and his half-witted foster-daughter. There was never any hint, in that humble home, of the gaudy connubial debaucheries that the modern sex hygienists describe so eloquently. Anthony had to go outside for his fun. Comstockery was his corner saloon.

  I confess to a great liking for the old imbecile. He is one of my favorite characters in American history, along with Frances E. Willard, Daniel Drew and Brigham Young. He added a great deal to the joys of life in the Federal Republic. More than any other man, he liberated American letters from the blight of Puritanism.

  Transcendentalism

  From AN UNHEEDED LAW-GIVER, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 191–94.

  First printed in the Smart Set, July, 1919, pp. 68–69

  What one notices about Ralph Waldo Emerson chiefly is his profound lack of influence upon the main stream of American thought, such as it is. His cult, in America, has been an affectation from the start. Not many of the literary professors, vassarized old maids and other such bogus intelligentsia who devote themselves to it have any intelligible understanding of the Transcendentalism at the heart of it, and not one of them, so far as I can make out, has ever executed Emerson’s command to “defer never to the popular cry.” On the contrary, it is precisely within the circle of Emersonian adulation that one finds the greatest tendency to test all ideas by their respectability, to combat free thought as something intrinsically vicious, and to yield placidly to “some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man.” It is surely not unworthy of notice that the country of this prophet of Man Thinking is precisely the country in which every sort of dissent from the current pishposh is combated most ferociously, and in which there is the most vigorous existing tendency to suppress free speech altogether.

  Thus Emerson, on the side of ideas, has left but faint tracks behind him. His quest was for “facts amidst appearances,” and his whole metaphysic revolved around a doctrine of transcendental first causes, a conception of interior and immutable realities, distinct from and superior to mere transient phenomena. But the philosophy that actually prevails among his countrymen—a philosophy put into caressing terms by William James—teaches an almost exactly contrary doctrine: its central idea is that whatever satisfies the immediate need is substantially true, that appearance is the only form of fact worthy the consideration of a man with money in the bank, and the old flag floating over him, and hair on his chest. Nor has Emerson had any ponderable influence as a literary artist in the technical sense. There is no Emersonian school of American writers. Current American writing, with its cocksureness, its somewhat hard competence, its air of selling goods, is utterly at war with his loose, impressionistic method, his often mystifying groping for ideas, his relentless pursuit of phrases. In the same way, one searches the country in vain for any general reaction to the cultural ideal that he set up. What remains of him at home is no more than, on the one hand, a somewhat absurd affectation of intellectual fastidiousness, now almost extinct even in New England, and, on the other hand, a debased Transcendentalism rolled into pills for fat women with vague pains and inattentive husbands—in brief, imbecility.

  The Man of Letters

  From THE NATIONAL LETTERS, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 52–54

  The man of letters, pure and simple, is a rarity in America. Almost always he is something else—and that something else commonly determines his public eminence. Mark Twain, with only his books to recommend him, would probably have passed into obscurity in middle age; it was in the character of a public entertainer that he wooed and won his country. The official criticism of the land denied him any solid literary virtue to the day of his death, and even today the campus critics and their journalistic valets stand aghast before “The Mysterious Stranger” and “What Is Man?” Emerson passed through almost the same experience. It was not as a man of letters that he was chiefly thought of in his time, but as the prophet of a new cult, half religious, half philosophical, and wholly unintelligible to nine-tenths of those who discussed it. So with Whitman and Poe—both hobgoblins far more than artists. So, even, with Howells: it was as the exponent of a dying culture that he was venerated, not as the practitioner of an art. Few actually read his books. His celebrity, of course, was real enough, but it somehow differed materially from that of a pure man of letters—say Conrad, Meredith, Hardy or Synge. That he was himself keenly aware of the national tendency to judge an artist in terms of the citizen was made plain at the time of the Gorky scandal, when he joined Clemens in an ignominious desertion of Gorky, scared out of his wits by the danger of being manhandled for a violation of the national pecksniffery.

  They Also Serve

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 23, 1923

  The Civil War in America ruined the South, and for two generations after Lee’s surrender it was almost as inert artistically as Mexico or Asia Minor; even today it lags very far behind the North in letters, and still further behind in music, painting and architecture. But the Civil War, though it went on for four years, strained the resources of the North very little, either in men or in money, and so its conclusion found the North rich and cocky, and out of that cockiness came an impetus which, in a few decades, set up a new and extremely vigorous American literature, founded an American school of painting, created an American architecture, and even laid the first courses of an American music. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James and William Dean Howells, all of them draft-dodgers in the war itself, were in a very real sense products of the great outburst of energy that followed it, and all of them, including even James, were as thoroughly American as Jay Gould, P. T. Barnum or Jim Fiske. The stars of the national letters in the years before the war had been Americans only by geographical accident. About Emerson there hung a smell of Königsberg and Weimar; Irving was simply a New York Englishman; Poe was a citizen of No Man’s Land; even Hawthorne and Cooper, despite their concern with American themes, showed not the slightest evidence of an American point of view. But Mark Twain, Howells and Whitman belonged to the Republic as palpably as Niagara Falls or Tammany Hall belonged to it, and so did James, though the thought horrified him and we must look at him through his brother William to get at the proof.

  Once More, with Feeling

  From the Smart Set, Aug., 1916, pp. 141–43

  The history of American literature (and of English literature no less) is one long chronicle of publishers’ imbecilities. The early books of Edgar Allan Poe, now run up in the auction rooms to hundreds and even thousands of dollars, were brought out, not by the leading publisher of Poe’s time, nor, indeed, by any recognized publisher at all, but by what were really no more than neighborhood job printers. So with the books of Whitman; even to this day he is printed, not by the solemn booksellers who gabble about their high services to literature, but by smaller and more obscure fellows. Try to pick up the early books of Ambrose Bierce; you will find imprints you never heard of before. As for Mark Twain, he had to start a publishing house of his own to get a free hand. True enough, when this venture failed (through the fault of his partners) he went back to a regular publisher—but with what result? With the result that it is quite impossible to buy a satisfactory edition of his collected works today. The only edition on the market contains many volumes that lack all, or a major part, of the original illustrations. Imagine “Huckleberry Finn” without Kemble’s pictures—the best illustrations, it seems to me, that any book in En
glish has ever had. Moreover, six years after his death his posthumous works remain unpublished, and among them, according to his biographer, are at least two books in his very best manner.

  A glance at the first editions of Joseph Conrad (now selling for as much as $30 apiece, though the earliest goes back no further than 1895) shows what a hard time he had finding an appreciative publisher. The first eleven bear six different London imprints. His American editions tell an even stranger story: the first six of them were brought out by six different publishers. When a few years ago, the firm of Doubleday, Page & Co. conceived the plan of reprinting his books in a uniform edition, it was found impossible to bring together the widely dispersed rights to all of them, and the uniform edition is still full of gaps, and such important works as “Nostromo” and “An Outcast of the Islands” are not in it. I salute this firm for its enterprise—but do not forget that its chief claim to fame is that it suppressed Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie.” Today it makes amends by publishing Gerald Stanley Lee and Gene Stratton Porter—surely sweet companions for Conrad, who is bedizened for the department-store trade, by the way, in navy-blue limp leather and all the other gaudy trappings of Corn Belt Kultur. The Harpers, after an obscure publisher had shown the way, took over “Sister Carrie”—and then made their own bid for immortality by jumping from under “The Titan.” The present publisher of the leading American novelist is the English firm of John Lane.…

  Another mystery of publishing is to be found in the incomprehensible system by which review copies are distributed. I have been reviewing books for fifteen years past, and have had that system under my eye all the while, and yet I do no more understand it today than I understand liturgical Russian. Whenever I find an author who pleases me and take to praising him lavishly in these pages and calling upon all Christian men to buy him and read him, his publisher is sure to stop sending me his books. And if, on the contrary, I try some poor devil of a scribbler by the lex talionis and do execution upon him with Prussian frightfulness, his publisher invariably sends me all of his ensuing works, and favors me with idiotic circular letters testifying to their unquestioned merit. I get, almost every week, books that, under no imaginable circumstances, could be reviewed to any purpose in the Smart Set—for example, books for little girls, books upon economics and trade, and even scientific books. At least twice during the past year I have been at pains to explain that I do not review war books—that it is the policy of this magazine (copiously supported by the gratitude of its readers) to avoid any discussion of the war, even in fiction or poetry. Nevertheless, I continue to receive nearly all the war books that are published, including the current treatises on preparedness by college boys, old maids, newspaper reporters and job-seekers. More, this present note will not shut off the stream. During the month following its publication I shall receive at least thirty such tomes, despite three fair warnings that all of them will go into my hell-box unread. The Barabbasian skull seems to be of four-ply celluloid; it takes a fearful battering to penetrate it. Or can it be that publishers never read reviews? It is supported by the obvious fact that they never read the books they publish.