In general, the American Mercury will live up to the adjective in its name. It will lay chief stress at all times upon American ideas, American problems and American personalities because it assumes that nine-tenths of its readers will be Americans and that they will be more interested in their own country than in any other. A number of excellent magazines are already devoted to making known the notions of the major and minor seers of Europe; at least half a dozen specialize in the ideas emanating from England alone. This leaves the United States rather neglected. It is, as the judicious have frequently observed, an immense country, and full of people. These people entertain themselves with a vast number of ideas and enterprises, many of them of an unprecedented and astounding nature. There are more political theories on tap in the Republic than anywhere else on earth, and more doctrines in aesthetics, and more religions, and more other schemes for regimenting, harrowing and saving human beings. Our annual production of messiahs is greater than that of all Asia. A single session of Congress produces more utopian legislation than Europe has seen since the first meeting of the English Witenagemot. To explore this great complex of inspirations, to isolate the individual prophets from the herd and examine their proposals, to follow the ponderous revolutions of the mass mind—in brief, to attempt a realistic presentation of the whole gaudy, gorgeous American scene—this will be the principal enterprise of the American Mercury.
Further Exposition
From the American Mercury, May, 1924, pp. 25–26
The American Mercury does not pretend to any austere judicial spirit in its dealings with charlatans. It is frankly against fortune-tellers, osteopaths, communists, New Thoughters, Wilsonian idealists, dowsers, Kiwanians, Christian Scientists, Ku Kluxers, Prohibitionists and all other such dolts and swindlers. Its columns are no more open to their rantings against sense than they are open to the political drivel of Mr. Coolidge, the prospectuses of the sellers of Texas oil stock, or the advertisements of Peruna. This magazine, in brief, is not dedicated to such debates as go on in country barber-shops, Epworth League meeting-rooms, and the smoking-cars of slow trains. It does not pretend to compete with the Congressional Record. It assumes that its readers are civilized, and that they are thus not partisans of any of the bizarre gospels which now engage 100% Americans, in all fields from aesthetics to obstetrics. It proposes, from time to time, to give them glimpses into these gospels, but not, certainly, with any notion that they are in danger of being converted. Its aim is to amuse them, not to insult them.
Thus the pussyfoots of the new evangels may as well take warning forthwith that no conceivable bombardment of protests and demands, however cunningly disguised as neutral and virtuous, will ever penetrate to these chaste pages. But to be anaesthetic to their lascivious approaches is one thing; to cherish the doctrine that they ought to be put down is quite another thing. Too much of that doctrine has been heard in the United States in late years. Until they grew strong enough to exert political power, the osteopaths, for example, were harassed in State after State, and even now, if I do not err, they are denied certain rights that all orthodox physicians, however incompetent, freely exercise. The Christian Scientists, before they perfected their press department, went through the same bedevilment, and elsewhere there are constant attacks upon fortune-tellers, layers-on of hands, communists, Ku Kluxers, Holy Rollers, Negrophiles, heroin addicts, cancer quacks, and a hundred and one other varieties of imbeciles and mountebanks. Here the strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good. The Harrison Act, despite its cruel provisions, has not diminished drug addiction in the slightest. The Mormons, after years of persecution, are still Mormons, and one of them is now a power in the Senate. Socialism in the United States was not laid by the Espionage Act, nor was the stately progress of osteopathy and chiropractic halted by the early efforts to put them down. Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.
An American Mercury Circular
The following, which bore no headline, was printed on an American Mercury letter-head, signed by me, and stuffed into the office mail. Its date I do not know, but it must have been 1930 or thereabout, at which time many innocents were looking to the magazine for leadership in the current war upon the Philistines
So far as I know—and I’d certainly have got news of it if it were a fact,—the American Mercury is wholly without moral purpose or what is called public spirit. It harbors no yearning to make the world better, and least of all the American world. It rejoices in this great Republic as in something rich and racy, and strives only to depict its life realistically and in good humor. What a show! What leapers through hoops! What clowns! I only hope that the readers of the magazine get half as much fun out of looking on as I get out of shifting the scenes.
Starting Point
From the American Mercury, June, 1925, pp. 215–16
I believe unreservedly only in what may be demonstrated scientifically. All the rest is pure speculation, and, only too often, pure bosh. It may, at times, be beautiful, but it is never important. That Shakespeare was a great poet is not a fact; it is only an opinion. It may be abandoned during the next century, as the doctrine that the Bible was written by God has been abandoned since 1850. But the fact that the blood circulates in the arteries and veins will never be abandoned. It is true now, and it will be true forever.
Petition
From the Smart Set, April, 1912, p. 157
From pale parsons with translucent ears and from little girls who speak pieces; from the scent of tuberoses and from medicated lingerie; from dinner invitations from friends who have wives who have sisters who have no living husbands; from tight collars and from “No Smoking” signs; from elderly ladies who have sure cures for toothache, and from barbers with perfumed fingers; from the nocturnes of Chopin, and from the New Thought; from persons who pasture their children in the hallways of hotels, and from postage-due stamps; from the harsh cacophony of liquorish snoring, and from imitation mahogany furniture; from adult males who wear diamonds, and from all high functionaries in fraternal orders; from bier-fisch, and from loose rugs on hardwood floors; from obscene novels by lady novelists, and from eczema; from grass butter, and from detachable cuffs; from fat women who loll grotesquely in automobiles, and from theater orchestras; from female bachelors of arts and from drizzly Sundays; from Fletcherism and from actors who speak of their “art”; from transcendentalism and from delirium tremens; from the Declaration of Independence and from cold dinner plates; from the key of B flat minor and from the struggle for existence; from pedants who denounce split infinitives, and from chemical purity; from canned book reviews and from German adverbs; from basso-profundos with prominent Adam’s apples, and from platitudes; from Asiatic cholera and from the Harvardocentric theory of the universe—good Lord, deliver us!
XXX. SELF-PORTRAIT
The Man and His Shadow
From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, pp. 120–23.
First printed in the Smart Set, Oct., 1921, pp. 41–42
EVERY MAN, whatever his actual qualities, is credited with and judged by certain general qualities that are supposed to appertain to his sex, particularly by women. Thus man the individual is related to Man the species, often to his damage and dismay. Consider my own case. I am by nature one of the most orderly of mortals. I have a place for every article of my personal property, whether a Bible or a machete, an undershirt or an eye-dropper, and I always keep it where it belongs. I never drop cigar-ashes on the floor. I never upset a waste-basket. I am never late for trains. I never go out with a purple necktie on a blue shirt. I never fail to appear in time for dinner without telephoning or telegraphing. Yet the women who have been cursed by God with the care of me have always maintained and cherished the fiction that I am an extremely careless and even hoggish fellow—that I have to be elaborately nurse
d, supervised and policed—that the slightest relaxation of vigilance over my everyday conduct would reduce me to a state of helplessness and chaos, with all my clothes mislaid, half my books in the ash-can, my mail unaswered, and my wea-sand unshaven. I make no protest; I merely record the facts. On my death-bed, I daresay, I shall try to make up for my life-long cantankerousness by doing what is expected of me. That is to say, I shall swallow a clinical thermometer or two, upset my clam-broth over my counterpane, keep a Ouija board and a set of dice under my pillow, and maybe, at the end, fall clumsily out of bed.
Personal Record
From the Smart Set, March, 1920, p. 48
To one ineradicable prejudice I freely confess, and that is a prejudice against poverty. I never have anything to do, if it is possible to avoid it, with anyone who is in financial difficulties, and I particularly avoid all persons who are in that state habitually, or who tremble hazardously on the edge of it. Such persons do not excite my compassion; they excite my aversion. I do not pity them, and do not believe in their common plaint that they are the victims of cruel and inexplicable circumstance. I have yet to meet one who did not show plain evidence that external circumstance had little, if anything, to do with his condition. The blame, so far as my experience runs, always lies within. The poor man is a stupid man, and usually a lazy and sentimental man. His poverty, nine times out of ten, is not due to a lack of opportunity, but to a shirking of opportunity. He is one who has turned aside from what he could do, sometimes in ignorance, more often in hollow vanity, and attempted futilely to do something beyond his capacity. In brief, he is an egoist brought down by his own egoism—and that is a figure, not in tragedy, but in farce. But I can’t laugh at him. It would cause a scandal, and get me an evil name. So I simply avoid him.
The Tight-Rope
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 9, 1927
In this department, by God’s grace, my own conscience is perfectly clear—perhaps my one plausible boast as a moral agent: I have never consciously tried to convert anyone to anything. Like any other man bawling from a public stamp I have occasionally made a convert; in fact, in seasons when my embouchure has been good I have made a great many. But not deliberately, not with any satisfaction. Next to a missionary, a convert is the most abhorrent shape I can imagine. I dislike persons who change their basic ideas, and I dislike them when they change them for good reasons quite as much as when they change them for bad ones. A convert to a good idea is simply a man who confesses that he was formerly an ass—and is probably one still. When such a man favors me with a certificate that my eloquence has shaken him I feel about him precisely as I’d feel if he told me that he had started (or stopped) beating his wife on my recommendation. No: it is not pleasant to come into contact with such flabby souls, so lacking in character and self-respect. Their existence embitters the life of every man who deals in ideas. The hard-boiled fellows are far more agreeable, no matter what their concrete notions. Some of those who appear to depart the farthest from the elements of sense are the most charming, for example, certain varieties of evangelical pastors. I have known many such pastors, and esteemed not a few of them. But only, I should add, the relatively unsuccessful, who seldom if ever achieved the public nuisance known as saving a soul. They believed their depressing rubbish firmly, but they did not press it upon either their inferiors or their superiors. They were not wowsers.
Unluckily, there are very few such pastors in the average Christian community, especially in the United States. The great majority, forgetting their office of conducting worship, devote themselves mainly to harassing persons who do not care to join them. This harassing is bad enough when it fails of its purpose; when it succeeds its consequence is simply an increase in the sum of human degradation, publicly displayed. It is well known that natural believers are always suspicious of converts. No wonder. For precisely the same reason sober automobilists are suspicious of drunken drivers, and Prohibition agents of Prohibitionists.
Is the skeptic ever happy, in the sense that a man who believes that God is watching over him is happy? Privately, I often doubt it. Here the pious seem to have a certain bulge on the doubters. Immersed in their faith, they enjoy a quiet contentment that is certainly never apparent to a man of restless, inquisitive, questioning mind. The happiest people in the world, accepting this definition of happiness, are probably Christian Scientists—that is, until they come down with appendicitis or gall-stones. But there is a kind of satisfaction that is quite as attractive, to certain rugged types of men, as this somewhat cow-like form of contentment. It is related to the latter just as the satisfaction of a soldier on active duty is related to the satisfaction of a man securely at home. The man at home is quite safe, and the soldier runs a considerable risk of being killed or wounded. But who will argue that the man at home, on the whole, is happier than the soldier—that is, assuming that the soldier is a volunteer? The one is tightly comfortable, and hence happy. But the other, though in grave peril, is happy too—and I am inclined to think that his happiness is often of a palpably superior variety.
So with the skeptic. His doubts, if they are real, undoubtedly tend to make him uneasy, and hence unhappy, for they play upon themselves quite as much as upon the certainties of the other fellow. What comforts him, in the long run, I suppose, is his pride in his capacity to face them. He is not wobbled and alarmed, like my correspondent; he gets a positive thrill out of being uneasy, as the soldier gets a thrill out of being in danger. Is this thrill equal, as a maker of anything rationally describable as happiness, to the comfort and security of the man of faith? Ask me an easier question! Is a blonde lovelier than a brunette? Is Dunkles better than Helles? Is Los Angeles the worst town in America, or only next to the worst? The skeptic, asked the original question, will say yes: the believer will say no. There you have it.
Categorical Imperatives
1 On Health
From the Smart Set, Oct., 1919, p. 83
What we mean by health is a state or condition in which the organism finds itself so delicately adapted to its environment that it is unconscious of irritation. Such a state, in any organism above the simplest, is necessarily transient; the life of such an organism is so tremendously complex a series of reactions that it is almost impossible to imagine all of them going on without friction. The earthworm has few diseases and is seldom ill; when he gets out of order at all it is usually a serious matter, and he dies forthwith. But man, being well-nigh infinitely complicated, gets out of order in a hundred thousand minor ways, and is always ailing more or less.
Perfect health, indeed, might almost be called a function of inferiority. Within the fold of the human race it is possible only to the lowest orders. A professionally healthy man, e.g., an acrobat, an athlete or an ice-wagon driver, is invariably an ass. In the Greece of the great days the athletes we hear so much about were very few in number, and most of them were imported barbarians. Not one of the eminent philosophers, poets or statesmen of Greece was a good high-jumper. Nearly all of them, in fact, had flabby muscles and bad stomachs, as you will quickly discern by examining their writings. The aesthetic impulse, like the thirst for truth, might almost be called a disease. It never appears in a perfectly healthy man.
2 On Honesty
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, March 5, 1923
The most dangerous of citizens to a democracy is the man who is honest—I do not mean honest, of course, in the mere policeman’s sense, but in the intellectual sense. The Emersonian counsel, “Be true to your nature, and follow its teachings,” is inevitably offensive to democrats; to put it into practice is to sin against the Holy Ghost. The history of the American Republic is simply a history of successive efforts to force successive minorities to be untrue to their nature, and not only to their nature, but also to all ordinary honor and self-respect. Whenever success has rewarded such an effort it has been depicted as a triumph for the good, the true and the beautiful.
3 On Truth
From DAMN! A BOOK OF
CALUMNY, 1918, p. 53
Second Mencken Chrestomathy Page 56
