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DAMN!
A BOOK OF CALUMNY
BY H. L. MENCKEN
_Third Printing_
PHILIP GOODMAN COMPANY
NEW YORK NINETEEN EIGHTEEN
COPYRIGHT 1918 BY
PHILIP GOODMAN COMPANY
CONTENTS
I Pater Patriæ 7
II The Reward of the Artist 9
III The Heroic Considered 10
IV The Burden of Humor 11
V The Saving Grace 13
VI Moral Indignation 14
VII Stable-Names 17
VIII The Jews 19
IX The Comstockian Premiss 22
X The Labial Infamy 23
XI A True Ascetic 28
XII On Lying 30
XIII History 32
XIV The Curse of Civilization 34
XV Eugenics 35
XVI The Jocose Gods 37
XVII War 38
XVIII Moralist and Artist 39
XIX Actors 40
XX The Crowd 45
XXI An American Philosopher 48
XXII Clubs 49
XXIII Fidelis ad Urnum 50
XXIV A Theological Mystery 52
XXV The Test of Truth 53
XXVI Literary Indecencies 54
XXVII Virtuous Vandalism 55
XXVIII A Footnote on the Duel of Sex 60
XXIX Alcohol 64
XXX Thoughts on the Voluptuous 67
XXXI The Holy Estate 69
XXXII Dichtung und Wahrheit 70
XXXIII Wild Shots 71
XXXIV Beethoven 73
XXXV The Tone Art 75
XXXVI Zoos 80
XXXVII On Hearing Mozart 86
XXXVIII The Road to Doubt 87
XXXIX A New Use for Churches 88
XL The Root of Religion 90
XLI Free Will 91
XLII Quid est Veritas? 95
XLIII The Doubter's Reward 96
XLIV Before the Altar 97
XLV The Mask 98
XLVI Pia Veneziani, poi Cristiani 99
XLVII Off Again, On Again 101
XLVIII Theology 102
XLIX Exemplia Gratia 103
DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY
I.
PATER PATRIÆ
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
alliances, and denounced their evils in harsh, specific terms. He had a
liking for all forthright and pugnacious men, and a contempt for
lawyers, schoolmasters and all other such obscurantists. He was not
pious. He drank whisky 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
all the yellow journals for belonging to the Invisible Government, the
Hell Hounds of Plutocracy, the Money Power, the Interests. The Sherman
Act would have him in its toils; he would be under indictment by every
grand jury south of the Potomac; the triumphant prohibitionists 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. The suffragettes would be on his trail, with
sentinels posted all along the Accotink road. The initiators and
referendors would be bawling for his blood. The young college men of the
_Nation_ and the _New Republic_ would be lecturing him weekly. He would
be used to scare children in Kansas and Arkansas. The chautauquas would
shiver whenever his name was mentioned....
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!
II
THE REWARD OF THE ARTIST
A man labors and fumes for a whole year to write a symphony in G minor.
He puts enormous diligence into it, and much talent, and maybe no little
downright genius. It draws his blood and wrings his soul. He dies in it
that he may live again.... Nevertheless, its final value, in the open
market of the world, is a great deal less than that of a fur overcoat,
half a Rolls-Royce automobile, or a handful of authentic hair from the
whiskers of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
III
THE HEROIC CONSIDERED
For humility and poverty, in themselves, the world has little liking and
less respect. In the folk-lore of all races, despite the
sentimentalization of abasement for dramatic effect, it is always power
and grandeur that count in the end. The whole point of the story of
Cinderella, the most widely and constantly charming of all stories, is
that the Fairy Prince lifts Cinderella above her cruel sisters and
stepmother, and so enables her to lord it over them. The same idea
underlies practically all other folk-stories: the essence of each of
them is to be found in the ultimate triumph and exaltation of its
protagonist. And of the real men and women of history, the most
venerated and envied are those whose early humiliations were but
preludes to terminal glories; for example, Lincoln, Whittington,
Franklin, Columbus, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, Catherine, Mary of
Magdala, Moses. Even the Man of Sorrows, cradled in a manger and done to
death between two thieves, is seen, as we part from Him at last, in a
situation of stupendous magnificence, with infinite power in His hands.
Even the Beatitudes, in the midst of their eloquent counselling of
renunciation, give it unimaginable splendor as its reward. The meek
shall inherit--what? The whole earth! And the poor in spirit? They shall
sit upon the right hand of God!...
IV
THE BURDEN OF HUMOR
What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so
dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public
laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic?
Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of life
is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not. No man had
more of the comic spirit in him than William Shakespeare, and yet his
serious reflections, by the sheer force of their sublime obviousness,
have pushed their way into the race's arsenal of immortal platitudes.
So, too, with Aesop, and with Balzac, and with Dickens, to come down the
scale. All of these men were fundamentally humorists, and yet all of
them achieved what the race has come to accept as a penetrating
sagacity. Contrariwise, many a haloed pundit has had his occasional
guffaw. Lincoln, had there been no Civil War, might have survived in
history chiefly as the father of the American smutty story--the only
original art-form that America has yet contributed to literature.
Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age,
might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome
trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Molière; his
surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to
the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony,
turned to the sardonic bull-fiddling of the _scherzo_.
No, there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and nonsense,
humor and respectability, despite the skittish tendency to assume that
there is. But, why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact of
life lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness?
None other, I am convinced, than the fact that the average man is far
too stupid to make a joke. He may _see_ a joke and _love_ a joke,
particularly when it floors and flabbergasts some person he dislikes,
but the only way he can himself take part in the priming and pointing of
a new one is by acting as its target. In brief, his personal contact
with humor tends to fill him with an accumulated sense of disadvantage,
of pricked complacency, of sudden and crushing defeat; and so, by an
easy psychological process, he is led into the idea that the thing
itself is incompatible with true dignity of character and intellect.
Hence his deep suspicion of jokers, however adept their thrusts. "What a
damned fool!"--this same half-pitying tribute he pays to wit and butt
alike. He cannot separate the virtuoso of comedy from his general
concept of comedy itself, and that concept is inextricably mingled with
memories of foul ambuscades and mortifying hurts. And so it is not often
that he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condone
frivolity in a sage.
V
THE SAVING GRACE
Let us not burn the universities--yet. After all, the damage they do
might be worse.... Suppose Oxford had snared and disemboweled
Shakespeare! Suppose Harvard had set its stamp upon Mark Twain!
VI
MORAL INDIGNATION
The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the
republic--against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday
moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the
cigarette, against all things sinful and charming--these astounding
Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of
mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob
is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor
of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law
will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates. The poor
numskull who is so horribly harrowed by Puritan pulpit-thumpers that he
can't go to a ball game on Sunday afternoon without dreaming of hell and
the devil all Sunday night is naturally envious of the fellow who can,
and being envious of him, he hates him and is eager to destroy his
offensive happiness. The farmer who works 18 hours a day and never gets
a day off is envious of his farmhand who goes to the crossroads and
barrels up on Saturday afternoon; hence the virulence of prohibition
among the peasantry. The hard-working householder who, on some bitter
evening, glances over the _Saturday Evening Post_ for a square and
honest look at his wife is envious of those gaudy drummers who go
gallivanting about the country with scarlet girls; hence the Mann act.
If these deviltries were equally open to all men, and all men were
equally capable of appreciating them, their unpopularity would tend to
wither.
I often think, indeed, that the prohibitionist tub-thumpers make a
tactical mistake in dwelling too much upon the evils and horrors of
alcohol, and not enough upon its delights. A few enlarged photographs of
first-class bar-rooms, showing the rows of well-fed, well-dressed
_bibuli_ happily moored to the brass rails, their noses in fragrant mint
and hops and their hands reaching out for free rations of olives,
pretzels, cloves, pumpernickle, Bismarck herring, anchovies,
_schwartenmagen_, wieners, Smithfield ham and dill pickles--such a
gallery of contentment would probably do far more execution among the
dismal _shudra_ than all the current portraits of drunkards' livers. To
vote for prohibition in the face of the liver portraits means to vote
for the good of the other fellow, for even the oldest bibulomaniac
always thinks that he himself will escape. This is an act of altruism
almost impossible to the mob-man, whose selfishness is but little
corrupted by the imagination that shows itself in his betters. His most
austere renunciations represent no more than a matching of the joys of
indulgence against the pains of hell; religion, to him, is little more
than synthesized fear.... I venture that many a vote for prohibition
comes from gentlemen who look longingly through swinging doors--and pass
on in propitiation of Satan and their alert consorts, the lake of
brimstone and the corrective broomstick....
VII
STABLE-NAMES
Why doesn't some patient drudge of a _privat dozent_ compile a
dictionary of the stable-names of the great? All show dogs and race
horses, as everyone knows, have stable-names. On the list of entries a
fast mare may appear as Czarina Ogla Fedorovna, but in the stable she is
not that at all, nor even Czarina or Olga, but maybe Lil or Jennie. And
a prize bulldog, Champion Zoroaster or Charlemagne XI. on the bench, may
be plain Jack or Ponto _en famille_. So with celebrities of the _genus
homo_. Huxley's official style and appellation was "The Right Hon.
Thomas Henry Huxley, P. C., M. D., Ph. D., LL. D., D. C. L., D. Sc., F.
R. S.," and his biographer tells us that he delighted in its rolling
grandeur--but to his wife he was always Hal. Shakespeare, to his fellows
of his Bankside, was Will, and perhaps Willie to Ann Hathaway. The
Kaiser is another Willie: the late Czar so addressed him in their famous
exchange of telegrams. The Czar himself was Nicky in those days, and no
doubt remains Nicky to his intimates today. Edgar Allan Poe was always
Eddie to his wife, and Mark Twain was always Youth to his. P. T.
Barnum's stable-name was Taylor, his middle name; Charles Lamb's was
Guy; Nietzsche's was Fritz; Whistler's was Jimmie; the late King
Edward's was Bertie; Grover Cleveland's was Steve; J. Pierpont Morgan's
was Jack; Dr. Wilson's is Tom.
Some given names are surrounded by a whole flotilla of stable-names.
Henry, for example, is softened variously into Harry, Hen, Hank, Hal,
Henny, Enery, On'ry and Heinie. Which did Ann Boleyn use when she cooed
into the suspicious ear of Henry VIII.? To which did Henrik Ibsen answer
at the domestic hearth? It is difficult to imagine his wife calling him
Henrik: the name is harsh, clumsy, razor-edged. But did she make it Hen
or Rik, or neither? What was Bismarck to the Fürstin, and to the mother
he so vastly feared? Ottchen? Somehow it seems impossible. What was
Grant to his wife? Surely not Ulysses! And Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? And
Rutherford B. Hayes? Was Robert Browning ever Bob? Was John Wesley ever
Jack? Was Emmanuel Swendenborg ever Manny? Was Tadeusz Kosciusko ever
Teddy?
A fair field of inquiry invites. Let some laborious assistant professor
explore and chart it. There will be more of human nature in his report
than in all the novels ever written.
VIII
THE JEWS
The Jews, like the Americans, labor under a philosophical dualism, and
in both cases it is a theological heritage. On the one hand there is the
idealism that is lovely and uplifting and will get a man into heaven,
and on the other hand there is the realism that works. The fact that the
Jews cling to both, thus running, as it were, upon two tracks, is what
makes them so puzzling, now and then, to the _goyim_. In one aspect they
stand for the most savage practicality; in another aspect they are
dreamers of an almost fabulous other-worldiness. My own belief is that
the essential Jew is the idealist--that his occasional flashing of hyena
teeth is no more than a necessary concession to the harsh demands of the
struggle for existence. Perhaps, in many cases, it is due to an actual
corruption of blood. The Jews come from the Levant, and their women were
exposed for many centuries to the admiration of Greek, Arab and
Armenian. The shark that a Jew can be at his worst is simply a Greek or
Armenian at his best.
As a statement of post-mortem and super-terrestrial fact, the religion
that the Jews have foisted upon the world seems to me to be as vast a
curse as the influenza that we inherit from the Tatars or the democratic
fallacies set afloat by the French Revolution. The one thing that can
be said in favor of it is that it is not true, and yet we suffer from it
almost as much as if it were true. But with it, encasing it and
preserving it, there has come something that is positively
valuable--something, indeed, that is beyond all price--and that is
Jewish poetry. To compare it to the poetry of any other race is wholly
impossible; it stands completely above all the rest; it is as far beyond
the next best as German music is beyond French music, or French painting
beyond English painting, or the English drama beyond the Italian drama.
There are single chapters in the Old Testament that are worth all the
poetry ever written in the New World and nine-tenths of that written in
the Old. The Jews of those ancient days had imagination, they had
dignity, they had ears for sweet sound, they had, above all, the faculty
of grandeur. The stupendous music that issued from them has swept their
barbaric demonology along with it, setting at naught the collective
intelligence of the human species; they embalmed their idiotic taboos
and fetishes in undying strains, and so gave them some measure of the
same immortality. A race of lawgivers? Bosh! Leviticus is as archaic as
the Code of Manu, and the Decalogue is a fossil. A race of seers? Bosh
again! The God they saw survives only as a bogey-man, a theory, an
uneasy and vexatious ghost. A race of traders and sharpers? Bosh a third
time! The Jews are as poor as the Spaniards. But a race of poets, my
lords, a race of poets! It is a vision of beauty that has ever haunted
them. And it has been their destiny to transmit that vision, enfeebled,
perhaps, but still distinct, to other and lesser peoples, that life
might be made softer for the sons of men, and the goodness of the Lord
God--whoever He may be--might not be forgotten.
IX
THE COMSTOCKIAN PREMISS
It is argued against certain books, by virtuosi of moral alarm, that
they depict vice as attractive. This recalls the king who hanged a judge
for deciding that an archbishop was a mammal.
X
THE LABIAL INFAMY
After five years of search I have been able to discover but one book in
English upon the art of kissing, and that is a very feeble treatise by a
savant of York, Pa., Dr. R. McCormick Sturgeon. There may be others, but
I have been quite unable to find them. Kissing, for all one hears of it,
has not attracted the scientists and literati; one compares its meagre
literature with the endless books upon the other phenomena of love,
especially divorce and obstetrics. Even Dr. Sturgeon, pioneering
bravely, is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of the
thing he vivisects, and so his book is no more than a compendium of
mush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorous
gabble about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such-like
imaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that the
lungs are "strongly expanded" during the act? My own casual observation
inclines me to hold that the opposite is true, that the lungs are
actually collapsed in a pseudo-asthmatic spasm. Again, what is the
ground for arguing that the lips are "full, ripe and red?" The real
effect of the emotions that accompany kissing is to empty the
superficial capillaries and so produce a leaden pallor. As for such
salient symptoms as the temperature, the pulse and the rate of
respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs.
Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate
treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear and
Conventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning.
Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or four
volumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteries
of sex, and his collection of materials is unsurpassed in the world.
Surely there must be an enormous mass of instructive stuff about kissing
in his card indexes, letter files, book presses and archives.
Just why the kiss as we know it should have attained to its present
popularity in Christendom is probably one of the things past finding
out. The Japanese, a very affectionate and sentimental people, do not
practise kissing in any form; they regard the act, in fact, with an
aversion matching our own aversion to the rubbing of noses. Nor is it in
vogue among the Moslems, nor among the Chinese, who countenance it only
as between mother and child. Even in parts of Christendom it is girt
about by rigid taboos, so that its practise tends to be restricted to a
few occasions. Two Frenchmen or Italians, when they meet, kiss each
other on both cheeks. One used to see, indeed, many pictures of General
Joffre thus bussing the heroes of Verdun; there even appeared in print a
story to the effect that one of them objected to the scratching of his
moustache. But imagine two Englishmen kissing! Or two Germans! As well
imagined the former kissing the latter! Such a display of affection is
simply impossible to men of Northern blood; they would die with shame if
caught at it. The Englishman, like the American, never kisses if he can
help it. He even regards it as bad form to kiss his wife in a railway
station, or, in fact, anywhere in sight of a third party. The Latin has
no such compunctions. He leaps to the business regardless of place or
time; his sole concern is with the lady. Once, in driving from Nice to
Monte Carlo along the lower Corniche road, I passed a hundred or so open
taxicabs containing man and woman, and fully 75 per cent. of the men had
their arms around their companions, and were kissing them. These were
not peasants, remember, but well-to-do persons. In England such a scene
would have caused a great scandal; in most American States the police
would have charged the offenders with drawn revolvers.
The charm of kissing is one of the things I have always wondered at. I
do not pretend, of course, that I have never done it; mere politeness
forces one to it; there are women who sulk and grow bellicose unless one
at least makes the motions of kissing them. But what I mean is that I
have never found the act a tenth part as agreeable as poets, the authors
of musical comedy librettos, and (on the contrary side) chaperones and
the _gendarmerie_ make it out. The physical sensation, far from being
pleasant, is intensely uncomfortable--the suspension of respiration,
indeed, quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation--and the
posture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips is
unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically, a man
kisses a woman perpendicularly, with their eyes, those "windows of the
soul," synchronizing exactly. But actually, on account of the
incompressibility of the nasal cartilages, he has to incline either his
or her head to an angle of at least 60 degrees, and the result is that
his right eye gazes insanely at the space between her eyebrows, while
his left eye is fixed upon some vague spot behind her. An instantaneous
photograph of such a maneuvre, taken at the moment of incidence, would
probably turn the stomach of even the most romantic man, and force him,
in sheer self-respect, to renounce kissing as he has renounced leap-frog
and walking on stilts. Only a woman (for women are quite devoid of
aesthetic feeling) could survive so damning a picture.
But the most embarrassing moment, in kissing, does not come during the
actual kiss (for at that time the sensation of suffocation drives out
all purely psychical feelings), but immediately afterward. What is one
to say to the woman then? The occasion obviously demands some sort of
remark. One has just received (in theory) a great boon; the silence
begins to make itself felt; there stands the fair one, obviously
waiting. Is one to thank her? Certainly that would be too transparent a
piece of hypocrisy, too flaccid a banality. Is one to tell her that one
loves her? Obviously, there is danger in such assurances, and beside,
one usually doesn't, and a lie is a lie. Or is one to descend to chatty
commonplaces--about the weather, literature, politics, the war? The
practical impossibility of solving the problem leads almost inevitably
to a blunder far worse than any merely verbal one: one kisses her again,
and then again, and so on, and so on. The ultimate result is satiety,
repugnance, disgust; even the girl herself gets enough.
XI
A TRUE ASCETIC
Herbert Spencer's objection to swearing, of which so much has been made
by moralists, was not an objection to its sinfulness but an objection to
its charm. In brief, he feared comfort, satisfaction, joy. The boarding
houses in which he dragged out his gray years were as bare and cheerless
as so many piano boxes. He avoided all the little vices and dissipations
which make human existence bearable: good eating, good drinking,
dancing, tobacco, poker, poetry, the theatre, personal adornment,
philandering, adultery. He was insanely suspicious of everything that
threatened to interfere with his work. Even when that work halted him by
the sheer agony of its monotony, and it became necessary for him to find
recreation, he sought out some recreation that was as unattractive as
possible, in the hope that it would quickly drive him back to work
again. Having to choose between methods of locomotion on his holidays,
he chose going afoot, the most laborious and least satisfying available.
Brought to bay by his human need for a woman, he directed his fancy
toward George Eliot, probably the most unappetizing woman of his race
and time. Drawn irresistibly to music, he avoided the Fifth Symphony and
"Tristan und Isolde," and joined a crowd of old maids singing part songs
around a cottage piano. John Tyndall saw clearly the effect of all this
and protested against it, saying, "He'd be a much nicer fellow if he had
a good swear now and then"--_i. e._, if he let go now and then, if he
yielded to his healthy human instincts now and then, if he went on some
sort of debauch now and then. But what Tyndall overlooked was the fact
that the meagreness of his recreations was the very element that
attracted Spencer to them. Obsessed by the fear--and it turned out to be
well-grounded--that he would not live long enough to complete his work,
he regarded all joy as a temptation, a corruption, a sin of scarlet. He
was a true ascetic. He could sacrifice all things of the present for one
thing of the future, all things real for one thing ideal.
XII
ON LYING
Lying stands on a different plane from all other moral offenses, not
because it is intrinsically more heinous or less heinous, but simply
because it is the only one that may be accurately measured. Forgetting
unwitting error, which has nothing to do with morals, a statement is
either true or not true. This is a simple distinction and relatively
easy to establish. But when one comes to other derelictions the thing
grows more complicated. The line between stealing and not stealing is
beautifully vague; whether or not one has crossed it is not determined
by the objective act, but by such delicate things as motive and purpose.
So again, with assault, sex offenses, and even murder; there may be
surrounding circumstances which greatly condition the moral quality of
the actual act. But lying is specific, exact, scientific. Its capacity
for precise determination, indeed, makes its presence or non-presence
the only accurate gauge of other immoral acts. Murder, for example, is
nowhere regarded as immoral save it involve some repudiation of a social
compact, of a tacit promise to refrain from it--in brief, some deceit,
some perfidy, some lie. One may kill freely when the pact is formally
broken, as in war. One may kill equally freely when it is broken by the
victim, as in an assault by a highwayman. But one may not kill so long
as it is not broken, and one may not break it to clear the way. Some
form of lie is at the bottom of all other recognized crimes, from
seduction to embezzlement. Curiously enough, this master immorality of
them all is not prohibited by the Ten Commandments, nor is it penalized,
in its pure form, by the code of any civilized nation. Only savages have
laws against lying _per se_.
XIII
HISTORY
It is the misfortune of humanity that its history is chiefly written by
third-rate men. The first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record and
philosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to him, is an adventure, not
a syllogism or an autopsy. Thus the writing of history is left to
college professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-heads. Few historians,
great or small, have shown any capacity for the affairs they presume to
describe and interpret. Gibbon was an inglorious failure as a member of
Parliament. Thycydides made such a mess of his military (or, rather,
naval) command that he was exiled from Athens for twenty years and
finally assassinated. Flavius Josephus, serving as governor of Galilee,
lost the whole province to the Romans, and had to flee for his life.
Momssen, elected to the Prussian Landtag, flirted with the Socialists.
How much better we would understand the habits and nature of man if
there were more historians like Julius Caesar, or even like Niccolo
Machiavelli! Remembering the sharp and devastating character of their
rough notes, think what marvelous histories Bismarck, Washington and
Frederick the Great might have written! Such men are privy to the facts;
the usual historians have to depend on deductions, rumors, guesses.
Again, such men know how to tell the truth, however unpleasant; they
are wholly free of that puerile moral obsession which marks the
professor.... But they so seldom tell it! Well, perhaps some of them
have--and their penalty is that they are damned and forgotten.
XIV
THE CURSE OF CIVILIZATION
A civilized man's worst curse is social obligation. The most unpleasant
act imaginable is to go to a dinner party. One could get far better
food, taking one day with another, at Childs', or even in a Pennsylvania
Railroad dining-car; one could find far more amusing society in a
bar-room or a bordello, or even at the Y. M. C. A. No hostess in
Christendom ever arranged a dinner party of any pretensions without
including at least one intensely disagreeable person--a vain and vapid
girl, a hideous woman, a follower of baseball, a stock-broker, a veteran
of some war or other, a gabbler of politics. And one is enough to do the
business.
XV
EUGENICS
The error of the eugenists lies in the assumption that a physically
healthy man is the best fitted to survive. This is true of rats and the
_pediculae_, but not of the higher animals, _e. g._, horses, dogs and
men. In these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities,
chiefly of the spirit. Imagine estimating philosophers by their chest
expansions, their blood pressures, their Wassermann reactions!
The so-called social diseases, over which eugenists raise such a pother,
are surely not the worst curses that mankind has to bear. Some of the
greatest men in history have had them; whole nations have had them and
survived. The truth about them is that, save in relatively rare cases,
they do very little damage. The horror in which they are held is chiefly
a moral horror, and its roots lie in the assumption that they cannot be
contracted without sin. Nothing could be more false. Many great
moralists have suffered from them: the gods are always up to such
sardonic waggeries.
Moreover, only one of them is actually inheritable, and that one is
transmitted relatively seldom. But among psychic characters one finds
that practically all are inheritable. For example, stupidity, credulity,
avarice, pecksniffery, lack of imagination, hatred of beauty, meanness,
poltroonry, petty brutality, smallness of soul.... I here present, of
course, the Puritan complex; there flashes up the image of the "good
man," that libel on God and the devil. Consider him well. If you had to
choose a sire for a first-rate son, would you choose a consumptive Jew
with the fires of eternity in his eyes, or an Iowa right-thinker with
his hold full of Bibles and breakfast food?
XVI
THE JOCOSE GODS
What humor could be wilder than that of life itself? Franz Schubert, on
his deathbed, read the complete works of J. Fenimore Cooper. John
Millington Synge wrote "Riders to the Sea" on a second-hand $40
typewriter, and wore a celluloid collar. Richard Wagner made a living,
during four lean years, arranging Italian opera arias for the cornet.
Herbert Spencer sang bass in a barber-shop quartette and was in love
with George Eliot. William Shakespeare was a social pusher and bought
him a bogus coat-of-arms. Martin Luther suffered from the jim-jams. One
of the greatest soldiers in Hungarian history was named Hunjadi
Janos....
XVII
WAR
Superficially, war seems inordinately cruel and wasteful, and yet it
must be plain on reflection that the natural evolutionary process is
quite as cruel and even more wasteful. Man's chief efforts in times of
peace are devoted to making that process less violent and sanguinary.
Civilization, indeed, may be defined as a constructive criticism of
nature, and Huxley even called it a conspiracy against nature. Man tries
to remedy what must inevitably seem the mistakes and to check what must
inevitably seem the wanton cruelty of the Creator. In war man abandons
these efforts, and so becomes more jovian. The Greeks never represented
the inhabitants of Olympus as succoring and protecting one another, but
always as fighting and attempting to destroy one another.
No form of death inflicted by war is one-half so cruel as certain forms
of death that are seen in hospitals every day. Besides, these forms of
death have the further disadvantage of being inglorious. The average
man, dying in bed, not only has to stand the pains and terrors of death;
he must also, if he can bring himself to think of it at all, stand the
notion that he is ridiculous.... The soldier is at least not laughed at.
Even his enemies treat his agonies with respect.
XVIII
MORALIST AND ARTIST
I dredge up the following from an essay on George Bernard Shaw by Robert
Blatchford, the English Socialist: "Shaw is something much better than a
wit, much better than an artist, much better than a politician or a
dramatist; he is a moralist, a teacher of ethics, austere, relentless,
fiercely earnest."
What could be more idiotic? Then Cotton Mather was a greater man than
Johann Sebastian Bach. Then the average college critic of the arts, with
his balderdash about inspiration and moral purpose, is greater than
Georg Brandes or Saint-Beuve. Then Éugene Brieux, with his Y. M. C. A.
platitudinizing, is greater than Molière, with his ethical agnosticism,
his ironical determinism.
This childish respect for moralizing runs through the whole of
contemporary criticism--at least in England and America. Blatchford
differs from the professorial critics only in the detail that he can
actually write. What he says about Shaw has been said, in heavy and
suffocating words, by almost all of them. And yet nothing could be more
untrue. The moralist, at his best, can never be anything save a sort of
journalist. Moral values change too often to have any serious validity
or interest; what is a virtue today is a sin tomorrow. But the man who
creates a thing of beauty creates something that lasts.
XIX
ACTORS
"In France they call an actor a _m'as-tu-vu_, which, anglicised, means a
have-you-seen-me?... The average actor holds the mirror up to nature and
sees in it only the reflection of himself." I take the words from a late
book on the so-called art of the mime by the editor of a magazine
devoted to the stage. The learned author evades plumbing the
psychological springs of this astounding and almost invariable vanity,
this endless bumptiousness of the _cabotin_ in all climes and all ages.
His one attempt is banal: "a foolish public makes much of him." With all
due respect, Nonsense! The larval actor is full of hot and rancid gases
long before a foolish public has had a fair chance to make anything of
him at all, and he continues to emit them long after it has tried him,
condemned him and bidden him be damned. There is, indeed, little choice
in the virulence of their self-respect between a Broadway star who is
slobbered over by press agents and fat women, and the poor ham who plays
thinking parts in a No. 7 road company. The two are alike charged to the
limit; one more ohm, or molecule, and they would burst. Actors begin
where militia colonels, Fifth avenue rectors and Chautauqua orators
leave off. The most modest of them (barring, perhaps, a few unearthly
traitors to the craft) matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girl
on a slow ship. In their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challenged
only by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors. I have spoken of the
danger they run of bursting. In the case of tenors it must sometimes
actually happen; even the least of them swells visibly as he sings, and
permanently as he grows older....
But why are actors, in general, such blatant and obnoxious asses, such
arrant posturers and wind-bags? Why is it as surprising to find an
unassuming and likable fellow among them as to find a Greek without
fleas? The answer is quite simple. To reach it one needs but consider
the type of young man who normally gets stage-struck. Is he, taking
averages, the intelligent, alert, ingenious, ambitious young fellow? Is
he the young fellow with ideas in him, and a yearning for hard and
difficult work? Is he the diligent reader, the hard student, the eager
inquirer? No. He is, in the overwhelming main, the neighborhood fop and
beau, the human clothes-horse, the nimble squire of dames. The youths of
more active mind, emerging from adolescence, turn to business and the
professions; the men that they admire and seek to follow are men of
genuine distinction, men who have actually done difficult and valuable
things, men who have fought good (if often dishonest) fights and are
respected and envied by other men. The stage-struck youth is of a softer
and more shallow sort. He seeks, not a chance to test his mettle by hard
and useful work, but an easy chance to shine. He craves the regard, not
of men, but of women. He is, in brief, a hollow and incompetent
creature, a strutter and poseur, a popinjay, a pretty one....
I thus beg the question, but explain the actor. He is this silly
youngster grown older, but otherwise unchanged. An initiate of a
profession requiring little more information, culture or capacity for
ratiocination than that of the lady of joy, and surrounded in his
work-shop by men who are as stupid, as vain and as empty as he himself
will be in the years to come, he suffers an arrest of development, and
the little intelligence that may happen to be in him gets no chance to
show itself. The result, in its usual manifestation, is the average bad
actor--a man with the cerebrum of a floor-walker and the vanity of a
fashionable clergyman. The result, in its highest and holiest form is
the actor-manager, with his retinue of press-agents, parasites and
worshipping wenches--perhaps the most preposterous and awe-inspiring
donkey that civilization has yet produced. To look for sense in a fellow
of such equipment and such a history would be like looking for
serviettes in a sailors' boarding-house.
By the same token, the relatively greater intelligence of actresses is
explained. They are, at their worst, quite as bad as the generality of
actors. There are she-stars who are all temperament and
balderdash--intellectually speaking, beggars on horseback, servant girls
well washed. But no one who knows anything about the stage need be told
that it can show a great many more quick-minded and self-respecting
women than intelligent men. And why? Simply because its women are
recruited, in the main, from a class much above that which furnishes its
men. It is, after all, not unnatural for a woman of considerable
intelligence to aspire to the stage. It offers her, indeed, one of the
most tempting careers that is open to her. She cannot hope to succeed in
business, and in the other professions she is an unwelcome and
much-scoffed-at intruder, but on the boards she can meet men on an equal
footing. It is, therefore, no wonder that women of a relatively superior
class often take to the business.... Once they embrace it, their
superiority to their male colleagues is quickly manifest. All movements
against puerility and imbecility in the drama have originated, not with
actors, but with actresses--that is, in so far as they have originated
among stage folks at all. The Ibsen pioneers were such women as Helena
Modjeska, Agnes Sorma and Janet Achurch; the men all hung back. Ibsen,
it would appear, was aware of this superior alertness and took shrewd
advantage of it. At all events, his most tempting acting parts are
feminine ones.
The girls of the stage demonstrate this tendency against great
difficulties. They have to carry a heavy handicap in the enormous number
of women who seek the footlights merely to advertise their real
profession, but despite all this, anyone who has the slightest
acquaintance with stagefolk will testify that, taking one with another,
the women have vastly more brains than the men and are appreciably less
vain and idiotic. Relatively few actresses of any rank marry actors.
They find close communion with the strutting brethren psychologically
impossible. Stock-brokers, dramatists and even theatrical managers are
greatly to be preferred.
XX
THE CROWD
Gustave Le Bon and his school, in their discussions of the psychology of
crowds, have put forward the doctrine that the individual man, cheek by
jowl with the multitude, drops down an intellectual peg or two, and so
tends to show the mental and emotional reactions of his inferiors. It is
thus that they explain the well-known violence and imbecility of crowds.
The crowd, as a crowd, performs acts that many of its members, as
individuals, would never be guilty of. Its average intelligence is very
low; it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic, almost simian. Crowds,
properly worked up by skilful demagogues, are ready to believe anything,
and to do anything.
Le Bon, I daresay, is partly right, but also partly wrong. His theory is
probably too flattering to the average numskull. He accounts for the
extravagance of crowds on the assumption that the numskull, along with
the superior man, is knocked out of his wits by suggestion--that he,
too, does things in association that he would never think of doing
singly. The fact may be accepted, but the reasoning raises a doubt. The
numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with
new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his
habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely. In other
words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He refrains from all
attempts at lynching _a cappella_, not because it takes suggestion to
make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd
to make him brave enough to try it.
What happens when a crowd cuts loose is not quite what Le Bon and his
followers describe. The few superior men in it are not straightway
reduced to the level of the underlying stoneheads. On the contrary, they
usually keep their heads, and often make efforts to combat the crowd
action. But the stoneheads are too many for them; the fence is torn down
or the blackamoor is lynched. And why? Not because the stoneheads,
normally virtuous, are suddenly criminally insane. Nay, but because they
are suddenly conscious of the power lying in their numbers--because they
suddenly realize that their natural viciousness and insanity may be
safely permitted to function.
In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently
resident in the majority of its members--in all those members, that is,
who are naturally ignorant and vicious--perhaps 95 per cent. All studies
of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this
viciousness. They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower
orders of men are angels. This is nonsense. The lower orders of men are
incurable rascals, either individually or collectively. Decency,
self-restraint, the sense of justice, courage--these virtues belong
only to a small minority of men. This minority never runs amuck. Its
most distinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance to all
running amuck. The third-rate man, though he may wear the false whiskers
of a first-rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep his
head in the face of an appeal to his emotions. A whoop strips off his
disguise.
XXI
AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER
As for William Jennings Bryan, of whom so much piffle, pro and con, has
been written, the whole of his political philosophy may be reduced to
two propositions, neither of which is true. The first is the proposition
that the common people are wise and honest, and the second is the
proposition that all persons who refuse to believe it are scoundrels.
Take away the two, and all that would remain of Jennings would be a
somewhat greasy bald-headed man with his mouth open.
XXII
CLUBS
Men's clubs have but one intelligible purpose: to afford asylum to
fellows who haven't any girls. Hence their general gloom, their air of
lost causes, their prevailing acrimony. No man would ever enter a club
if he had an agreeable woman to talk to. This is particularly true of
married men. Those of them that one finds in clubs answer to a general
description: they have wives too unattractive to entertain them, and yet
too watchful to allow them to seek entertainment elsewhere. The
bachelors, in the main, belong to two classes: (a) those who have been
unfortunate in amour, and are still too sore to show any new enterprise,
and (b) those so lacking in charm that no woman will pay any attention
to them. Is it any wonder that the men one thus encounters in clubs are
stupid and miserable creatures, and that they find their pleasure in
such banal sports as playing cards, drinking highballs, shooting pool,
and reading the barber-shop weeklies?... The day a man's mistress is
married one always finds him at his club.
XXIII
FIDELIS AD URNUM
Despite the common belief of women to the contrary, fully 95 per cent.
of all married men, at least in America, are faithful to their wives.
This, however, is not due to virtue, but chiefly to lack of courage. It
takes more initiative and daring to start up an extra-legal affair than
most men are capable of. They look and they make plans, but that is as
far as they get. Another salient cause of connubial rectitude is lack of
means. A mistress costs a great deal more than a wife; in the open
market of the world she can get more. It is only the rare man who can
conceal enough of his income from his wife to pay for a morganatic
affair. And most of the men clever enough to do this are too clever to
be intrigued.
I have said that 95 per cent. of married men are faithful. I believe the
real proportion is nearer 99 per cent. What women mistake for infidelity
is usually no more than vanity. Every man likes to be regarded as a
devil of a fellow, and particularly by his wife. On the one hand, it
diverts her attention from his more genuine shortcomings, and on the
other hand it increases her respect for him. Moreover, it gives her a
chance to win the sympathy of other women, and so satisfies that craving
for martyrdom which is perhaps woman's strongest characteristic. A
woman who never has any chance to suspect her husband feels cheated and
humiliated. She is in the position of those patriots who are induced to
enlist for a war by pictures of cavalry charges, and then find
themselves told off to wash the general's underwear.
XXIV
A THEOLOGICAL MYSTERY
The moral order of the world runs aground on hay fever. Of what use is
it? Why was it invented? Cancer and hydrophobia, at least, may be
defended on the ground that they kill. Killing may have some benign
purpose, some esoteric significance, some cosmic use. But hay fever
never kills; it merely tortures. No man ever died of it. Is the torture,
then, an end in itself? Does it break the pride of strutting, snorting
man, and turn his heart to the things of the spirit? Nonsense! A man
with hay fever is a natural criminal. He curses the gods, and defies
them to kill him. He even curses the devil. Is its use, then, to prepare
him for happiness to come--for the vast ease and comfort of
convalescence? Nonsense again! The one thing he is sure of, the one
thing he never forgets for a moment, is that it will come back again
next year.
XXV
THE TEST OF TRUTH
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few religious dogmas have ever
faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene
swine. Dowie's whiskers broke the back of Dowieism. Not the laws of the
United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to
compromise and surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it
killed the doctrine of infant damnation.... But the razor edge of
ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the
barber-surgeons laughed at Harvey--and how vainly! What clown ever
brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Jenner? Or Lincoln?
Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet....
XXVI