Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  His instrument, as I have said, was the cello, which he mastered in early youth, and stuck to faithfully all his life. Violins were always in his hands, but he never ventured to play them, and in fact had no talent for the business. But as a cellist he had great skill, and in the Baltimore of his day there was no amateur to match him. He was a big fellow, tall, muscular, handsome and imposing, and he had a tone to go with his size. When he would get a good grip upon his bow and fall upon a passage to his taste the sounds that came out of his cello were like an army with banners. Moreover, they were always the precise sounds in the score, for he had a fine ear and he played in tune all the way up the scale, even to the treacherous peaks of the A string.

  He remained strictly an amateur to the end. He was often besought to play professionally, but he always refused. Years ago he was a member of the Haydn and Garland Orchestras and other such amateur organizations, and often appeared in public, sometimes as a soloist, but as he grew older he withdrew from this activity, and confined himself to playing with his family and his friends. So long as St. Mary’s Seminary was in operation in Paca street, he played there at the midnight mass every Christmas Eve. He was completely empty of piety, but he got on very well with the clergy, and one of his close friends was the late Dr. Theodore C. Foote, of St. David’s, Roland Park, another amateur cellist. More than once I have done accompaniments to their duets, with each exhorting the other to lay on, and the evening ending with the whole band exhausted.

  On the secular side he had got through almost everything written for the cello. For twenty-five years he went to the late Frederick H. Gottlieb’s house every Sunday night to engage in chamber music, and for even longer he played with the Saturday Night Club, of which he was a charter member. Nor was this all, for he put in many evenings playing with his wife, his daughter and his sister-in-law, and in his earlier days there were weeks when he made music every night. He was always ready to drop everything for a session with his cello. Once, years ago, I happened into his place one afternoon when a German exchange student was calling on him. The German allowed that he was a fiddler, and Al suggested a couple of trios. We played from 4 to 6:30, went out to dinner, returned at 7:30, and kept on until 11. Another time he was a party to a desperate scheme to play the first eight Beethoven symphonies seriatim. We began late one afternoon, and figured that, allowing for three suppers, one breakfast, one lunch, and five pauses for wind and beer, the job would take 24 hours. But we blew up before we got to the end of the Eroica.

  The headline that I have put on these lines indicates that this was a happy man. I believe that, in all my days, I have never known a happier. There were some people he disliked, and in discussing them he was capable of a blistering invective, but on the whole he was too good-humored to have enemies, and he got on well even with musicians, who are sometimes very difficult. He was a bachelor for many years, but was always quartered with friends, and so had a comfortable home. He made a good living, spent his money freely, had a civilized taste for sound eating and drinking, and never tired of music for an instant. When he married, relatively late in life, his luck remained with him, and he was presently the center of a charming family circle, with a little daughter whose precocious talent gave him great delight. He had a long and trying illness, but he was nursed with singular devotion and his doctor was an old and valued friend—and, I hope I need not add, a fiddler too. He faced death calmly, and slipped into oblivion at last with simple courage and no foolish regrets.

  Such a man, it seems to me, comes very close to the Aristotelian ideal of the good citizen and the high-minded man. There was no pretension in him, but his merits were solid and enduring. He possessed a kind of knowledge that was not common, and it was very useful. He treated his clients with great scrupulosity, and his professional reputation, unchallenged for many years, went far beyond the bounds of Baltimore. He was so unfailingly kindly, so thoroughly square and decent, so completely lovable that the whole world that he knew was filled with his friends. Most of his leisure, in his later days, was spent with men he had played with, musically and otherwise, for twenty, thirty and even forty years. The old-timers all stuck to him, and there were always youngsters coming in, to learn him and to love him. Save when illness made a prisoner of him he saw them constantly, and even as he lay dying he knew that he was in their daily thoughts, and would never pass out of their memories.

  They drop off one by one—Sam Hamburger, Phil Green, John Wade, Carl Schon, Henry Flood, Fred Colston, Charlie Bochau, and now Al Hildebrandt. These were pleasant fellows, one and all. The common bond between them was their love of music, and I suppose there is no better to be found. Certainly there can be none that makes life more genuinely cheerful and contented. Most of the men I have named were amateurs, and some were only listeners, but they had in common that amiable weakness for the squeaks of the fiddle and the burbles of the flute, and it kept them together for long years. They clustered around Al Hildebrandt. He was, in his way, the best friend of every one of them, and he remains the best friend of many who still live.

  Mourning him would be rather silly. He died too soon, but so do we all. The universe is run idiotically, and its only certain product is sorrow. But there are yet men who, by their generally pleasant spirits, by their intense and enlightened interest in what they have to do, by their simple dignity and decency, by their extraordinary capacity for making and keeping friends, yet manage to cheat, in some measure, the common destiny of mankind, doomed like the beasts to perish. Such a man was Albert Hildebrandt. It was a great privilege to be among his intimates; he radiated a sound and stimulating philosophy, and it was contagious. In all my days I have known no other who might have taken to himself with more reason the words of the ancient poet: “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

  XXVII. IRONIES

  Wild Shots

  From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, pp. 71–72.

  First printed in the Smart Set, Jan., 1917, pp. 271–72

  IF I HAD the time, and there were no sweeter follies offering, I should like to write an essay on the books that have quite failed of achieving their original purposes, and are yet of respectable use and potency for other purposes. For example, the Book of Revelation. The obvious aim of the learned author of this work was to bring the early Christians into accord by telling them authoritatively what to expect and hope for; its actual effect during nineteen hundred years has been to split them into a multitude of camps, and so set them to denouncing, damning, jailing and murdering one another. Again, consider the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Ben wrote it to prove that he was an honest man, a mirror of all the virtues, an injured innocent; the world, reading it, hails him respectfully as the noblest, the boldest, the gaudiest liar that ever lived. Again, turn to “Gulliver’s Travels.” The thing was planned by its rev. author as a devastating satire, a terrible piece of cynicism; it survives as a story-book for sucklings. Yet again, there is “Hamlet.” Shakespeare wrote it frankly to make money for a theatrical manager; it has lost money for theatrical managers ever since. Yet again, there is Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico.” Julius composed it to thrill and arouse the Romans; its sole use today is to stupefy and sicken schoolboys. The list might be lengthened almost ad infinitum. When a man writes a book he fires a machine-gun into a wood. The game he brings down often astonishes him, and sometimes horrifies him. Consider the case of Ibsen.… After my book on Nietzsche I was actually invited to lecture at Princeton.

  Between the Lines

  From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 106–07

  The world has very little sense of humor. It is always wagging its ears solemnly over elaborate jocosities. For 600 years it has gurgled over the “Divine Comedy” of Dante, despite the plain fact that the work is a flaming satire upon the whole Christian hocus-pocus of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell. To have tackled such nonsense head-on, in Dante’s time, would have been to flout the hangman; hence the poet clothed his atta
ck in an irony so delicate that the ecclesiastical police were baffled. Why is the poem called a comedy? I have read at least a dozen discussions of the question by modern pedants, all of them labored and unconvincing. The same problem obviously engaged the scholars of the poet’s own time. He called the thing simply “comedy”; they added the adjective “divine” in order to ameliorate what seemed to them to be an intolerable ribaldry. Well, here is a “comedy” in which human beings are torn limb from limb, boiled in sulphur, cut up with red-hot knives, and filled with molten lead. Can one imagine a man capable of such a magnificent poem regarding such fiendish imbecilities seriously? Certainly not. They appeared just as idiotic to him as they appear to you or me.

  The Fat Man

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 11, 1910

  Many vain tears are wasted upon the fat man. He is supposed to suffer from an appalling shortness of breath, and his florid complexion is ascribed to painful disorders of the circulation. The cartoonists picture him as being reduced to a sort of oily lava in Summer and as coming down upon the lee in Winter with sickening thuds and to the accompaniment of world-wide seismic disturbances. In plays he is always the target of slap-stick and seltzer siphon, but a note of pity appears in every laugh he raises. People are sincerely sorry for him, and are prone to dwell, with maudlin sentimentality, upon the fact that no sane woman ever falls in love with a fat man.

  Squandered sympathy! Wasted tears! The fat man, far from asking for them, cannot even understand them. To him the most beautiful thing in nature—the one thing, indeed, that convinces him of the essential benignity of the cosmic process—is the fact that he is fat. The fatter he gets the happier he grows. With every increase in his diameter there comes an access of comfort, of ease, of geniality, of contentment. Forced by a kind nature to give over violent physical exercise, he devotes himself to poetry, piano-playing, mathematics, philosophy, and other elevating divertissements. He is a hearty and discriminating eater and has time to make acquaintance with all the more rare and delightful victuals. He sleeps soundly and snores in the safe and sane key of C major. Excused, by public opinion, from all sartorial display, he is able to clothe himself in loose and comfortable garments. A happy man, taking his ease in his inn!

  The fact that sentimental women abhor the man of bulk is not a curse laid upon him, but a stroke of good fortune. As he fares through the world, radiating joy like some soothing emanation, his footsteps are not dogged by matchmaking mammas and debutantes of prehistoric vintages. No one lures him into dim-lit parlors. No one would think of inviting him to sit in a hammock or to row a boat. He is not a dancing man; he does not excel at tennis; long walks down Lovers’ Lane fatigue his feet. So the girls leave him to his exquisite reveries and sublime contemplations, and he goes through life unhunted, unharassed and unwed, growing fatter day by day and gaining happiness with every ounce, pound and ton.

  Thus he lives and dies, a being to be envied. To beauty, true enough, he cannot pretend, but in that virtue which proceeds from high thinking and that peace of mind which grows out of independence, public respect and efficiency—in these things he leads all other sentient creatures.

  Sunday Afternoon

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 1, 1929

  In the decaying neighborhood where I live Sunday afternoon is ordinarily very quiet. Such of the people as are pious seem to take religion very heavily. Thus their morning devotions exhaust them, and after the midday meal they are fit only for snoozing. The rest, I suspect, give over Sunday afternoons to home brewing: there is a pleasant smell of malt and hops in the air, and now and then a whiff of something stronger. Not many seem to have automobiles, and I am glad to be able to add that phonographs, automatic pianos, radio loud-speakers, and other such abominations are not common. Thus the second semester of the Sabbath is generally quiet, and I devote it to work.

  But last Sunday this work got itself interrupted, for there was a great commotion in the square opposite my house. The first sign of it was a series of bugle blasts, followed by vague shouts and murmurs. Going to the window, I found that the Salvation Army had taken possession of the square. Apparently it had come in force, for I counted at least fifty brothers and sisters in uniform, and with them they had a band. They also had a photographer with a huge camera, a dozen or more little girls in a sort of scout uniform, and an odd brother who wore what appeared to be the war-time livery of the Y.M.C.A. In front of the square, and directly before my house, were three Salvation Army trucks. Presently half a dozen of the brethren stripped off their coats and began unloading the trucks. First they threw out five or six contraptions not unlike carpenters’ trestles, but larger. There followed as many heavy boards cut in zigzags, like the risers of cellar steps. And then came fifteen or twenty long planks of pine, planed but not otherwise cut. It took a great deal of whooping and gesticulating to get these things out of the trucks. At least four brothers grabbed every plank, and by the time they had hoisted it over the side of the truck and dropped it on the sidewalk they had muffed it two or three times and one or another of them had got a clout from it. It was a warm day, and they sweated freely. For each one who actually touched a plank there were three or four to boss him.

  Meanwhile, a big crowd had begun to collect, mainly children from the nearby streets, and my neighbors forsook their bottling to hang out of their windows and watch. It soon appeared that the planks and trestles constituted the flesh and bones of a sort of grandstand that was to be erected on the lawn of the square, under two big trees. First the trestles were set up fifty or sixty feet from the sidewalk, and then a dignitary in uniform rushed up and ordered them taken nearer. Then it appeared that they were too far apart, and he ordered them put closer. Then they were too close, and he ordered them spread a bit. All this was done to the tune of a vast chattering and whooping. The members of the band, lolling under the trees, their instruments under their arms, took no part in putting up the grandstand: apparently they were excused, as artists, from such labor. But all the other Salvationists, at least those who were male, gave aid, and every one of them shouted orders to the others. Finally the trestles were got in place, the zigzag boards were laid against them, and the long planks were deposited upon the zigzags. The grandstand now began to reveal itself, and a couple of small boys were swinging their legs from the top plank before the lowermost one was in place. All the while the shouting and scurrying about went on, and now and then a cornetist in the band tooted an encouraging blast.

  The job still needed perfecting. At one end, on the top row, the planks ran out for four or five feet beyond the last trestle. If anyone happened to be sitting out there and the folks further in got up, it was obvious that the laws of gravitation would come into play. Half a dozen majors and colonels noticed the fact at once and sounded warnings. A dozen lesser warriors leaped at their call, and after a few minutes of heaving, tugging and shoving the planks were thrust back, so that they no longer ran out into space. The grandstand looked fragile, but it was ready for occupancy. The business of filling it began. First the small boys who had climbed it were chased off, and then the little girls in scout uniforms were lined up and ordered to get themselves to the top. They seemed reluctant to venture up, for the highest plank was at least seven feet above the lawn, but in a little while, with much urging by a dozen officers in uniform, two braved the climb, and then the others swarmed after them. They stood on the top plank and completely filled it. Between the trestles it sagged under them, and they held on to one another in plain fear, but the majors and colonels, aided by the Y.M.C.A. brother, assured them that it was all right, and so they stuck.

  Then began the business of filling the lower levels. This took even more shouting and running about than had gone before. Lady Salvationists had to be summoned from clear across the square. They came slowly, and the majors and colonels puffed and showed choler, but in the end, with the aid of a bugler, enough of them were got upon the scene. They clambered up the stand and sat in rows, and b
elow them and between them crowded dozens of children—whether converts or mere spectators I could not make out. Soon the stand was packed to its capacity. Every plank was bowed with the weight upon it, and the trestles began to settle into the soft earth of the lawn. A final hullabaloo, with the shirt-sleeved officers sweating more than ever, chased away unwanted volunteers and the photographer brought up his camera and began to focus it.

  This business took some time, for saucy boys were always leaping into the field of the lens, and having to be run out again. The Girl Scouts on the top plank did a lot of squealing, and every few seconds one of them began to wobble and there was an alarm, and more shouting and scurrying about, but none actually fell off, and so the photographer proceeded. Finally, he was ready, and twenty officers joined in cautioning everyone to be still. And then, just as he was about to expose his plate, the whole grandstand began to sway gently from side to side, and an instant later, to go over. The legs of the trestle at one end had sunk into the ground. Over she went!—and up rose a yell that must have been heard for three blocks. Fortunately, there were no serious casualties. The whole squad of majors and colonels, with the Y.M.C.A. brother for good measure, piled upon the wreck in one frantic leap, and the sisters in the background prepared to faint, but there was no sign of blood, and only one of the victims seemed to need aid. She was one of the older girls, and she came out with a bruised shoulder. Forty Samaritans fought to carry her to a nearby automobile, but she made it under her own steam.