H.L. Mencken
The American Mercury/February, 1924
The End of an Imperfect Day.—The beautiful day, the day of blue and gold and sunshine, is God’s gift to the plain people; the bad day, the day of gloom and gray and rain, He has reserved for the exclusive pleasure of the aristocracy. The artist, the connoisseur of emotions, the philosopher—these have no use for the fair day: it distracts them, summons them from their introspection and solitude, calls them into the open. On such a day, work and those pleasures dear to men with a taste for the sequestered are impossible: the outdoors beckons too persuasively and too disconcertingly. But when the world is full of wet and fog and the monotony of rain, then the artist, the connoisseur of quiet, the philosopher and all their brothers are happy. It is on such days, while the yokelry is eating dill pickles and cheese sandwiches on the roadsides, or riding in Fords through the Jersey swamps, or chasing small white balls across the grass with a repertoire of clubs, that men of soul and sadness revel in the happiness that only God’s elect can comprehend.
Portrait of an Ideal World.—That ethyl alcohol in dilute aqueous solution, when taken into the human organism, acts as a depressant, not as a stimulant, is now so much a commonplace of knowledge that even the more advanced varieties of physiologists are beginning to be aware of it. The intelligent layman no longer resorts to the jug when he has important business before him, whether intellectual or manual; he resorts to it after his business is done, and he desires to release his taut nerves and reduce the boiler-pressure in his spleen. Alcohol, so to speak, unwinds us. It raises the threshold of sensation and makes us less sensitive to external stimuli, and particularly to those that are unpleasant. It reduces and simplifies the emotions. Putting a brake upon all the qualities which enable us to get on in the world and shine before our fellows—for example, combativeness, shrewdness, diligence, ambition—it releases the qualities which mellow us and make our fellows love us—for example, amiability, generosity, toleration, humor, sympathy. A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B minor mass, but he is immensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, or to admire a pretty girl, or to subscribe to the Near East Relief, or to hear Bach’s B minor mass. The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind. Pithecanthropus erectus was a teetotaler, but the angels, you may be sure, know what is proper at 5 P. M.
All this is so obvious that I marvel that no Utopian has ever proposed to get rid of all the sorrows of the world by the simple device of getting and keeping the whole human race gently stewed. I do not say drunk, remember; I say simply gently stewed—and apologize, as in duty bound, for not knowing how to describe the state in a more seemly phrase. The man who is in it is a man who has put all of his best qualities into his showcase. He is not only immensely more amiable than the cold sober man; he is also immeasurably more decent. He reacts to all situations in an expansive, generous and humane manner. He has become more liberal, more tolerant, more kind. He is a better citizen, husband, father, friend. The enterprises that make human life on this earth uncomfortable and unsafe are never launched by such men. They are not makers of wars; they do not rob and oppress anyone; they invent no such swineries as high tariffs, 100 per cent Americanism, Methodism and Prohibition. All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel to the Treaty of Versailles, have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers. But all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs to terrapin a la Maryland, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from well water to something with color to it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.
I am well aware, of course, that getting the whole human race stewed and keeping it stewed, year in and year out, would present formidable technical difficulties. It would be hard to make the daily dose of each individual conform exactly to his private needs, and hard to get it to him at precisely the right time. On the one hand there would be the constant danger that large minorities might occasionally become cold sober, and so start wars, theological disputes, moral reforms, and other such unpleasantness. On the other hand, there would be danger that other minorities might proceed to actual intoxication, and so annoy us all with their fatuous bawling or maudlin tears. But such technical obstacles, of course, are by no means insurmountable. Perhaps they might be got around by abandoning the administration of alcohol per ora and distributing it instead by impregnating the air with it. I throw out the suggestion, and pass on. Such questions are for men skilled in therapeutics, government and business efficiency. They exist today and their enterprises often show a high ingenuity, but, being chiefly sober, they devote too much of their time to harassing the rest of us. Half-stewed, they would be ten times as humane, and perhaps at least half as efficient. Thousands of them, relieved of their present anti-social duties, would be idle, and eager for occupation. I trust to them in this small matter. If they didn’t succeed completely, they would at least succeed partially.
The objection remains that even small doses of alcohol, if each followed upon the heels of its predecessor before the effects of the latter had worn off, would have a deleterious effect upon the physical health of the race—that the death-rate would increase, and whole categories of human beings would be exterminated. The answer here is that what I propose is not lengthening the span of life, but augmenting its joys. Suppose we assume that its duration is reduced 20 per cent. My reply is that its delights will be increased at least 100 per cent. Misled by statisticians, we fall only too often into the error of worshipping mere figures. To say that A will live to be 80 and B will die at 40 is certainly not to argue plausibly that A is more to be envied than B. A, in point of fact, may have to spend all of his 80 years in Kansas or Arkansas, with nothing to eat save corn and hog-meat and nothing to drink save polluted river water, whereas B may put in his 29 years of discretion upon the Cote d’Azure. It is my contention that the world I picture, even assuming the average duration of human life to be cut down 50 per cent, would be an infinitely happier and more charming world than that we live in today—that no intelligent human being, having once tasted its peace and joy, would go back voluntarily to the harsh brutalities and stupidities which we now suffer, and so idiotically strive to prolong. If intelligent Americans, in these depressing days, still cling to life and try to stretch it out longer, but only atavistically, it is the primeval brute in them that hangs on, not the man. The man knows only too well that ten years in a genuinely civilized and happy country would be infinitely better than a geological epoch under the curses he must face and endure every hour today.
Moreover, there is no need to admit that the moderate alcoholization of the whole race would materially reduce the duration of life. A great many of us are moderately alcoholized already, and yet manage to survive quite as long as the blue-noses. As for the blue-noses themselves, who would repine if breathing alcohol-laden air brought them down with delirium tremens and so sterilized and exterminated them? The advantage to the race in general would be obvious and incalculable. All the worst strains—which now not only persist, but even prosper—would be stamped out in a few generations, and so the average human being would move appreciably away from, say, the norm of a Baptist clergyman in Georgia and toward the norm of Shakespeare, Mozart and Goethe. It would take eons, of course, to go all the way, but there would be progress with every generation, slow but sure. Today, it must be manifest, we make no progress at all; instead we slip steadily backward. That the average American of today is greatly inferior to the average American of two or three generations ago is too plain to need arguing. He has less enterprise and courage; he is less resourceful and intelligent; he is more like a rabbit and less like a lion. Harsh oppressions have made him what he is. He is the victim of tyrants. . . . Well, no man with two or three cocktails in him is a tyrant. He may be foolish, but he is not cruel. He may be noisy, but he is genial, tolerant, generous and kind. My proposal would restore Christianity to the world. It would rescue mankind from moralists, pedants and brutes.
More Reflections at Forty.—1. The letter of a woman is always more honest and more sincere than the letter of a man. A woman writes what she thinks and feels at the moment; a man, what he thinks he may think and feel tomorrow in terms of what he thought and felt yesterday.
2. Politics is the refuge of scoundrels—from other scoundrels.
3. A man’s wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.
4. One notices that those Englishmen who are most contemptuous of the American’s regard for money are all over here lecturing their heads off.
5. A fool is one who is intelligent at the wrong time.
6. Perfect democracy is possible only in a royal household.
7. One of the greatest of all bores is the precisionist in the use of words, the kind of person who in conversation is meticulously concerned with the exact use of the English language. Scrupulous English is the murderer of interesting colloquy. Conversation under such circumstances becomes less verbal intercourse between two human beings than a contest between two etymologists and grammarians.
8. I have yet to attend a great social affair in England or America at which all the most eligible bachelors present were not trying to break away to keep a date with some Cinderella.
9. The worth-while man generally has a streak of laziness in him. It is the essentially snide fellow who is ever on the alert, ever up-and-doing, ever the consistent go-getter.
Homo Sapiens.—That the great majority of men are quite incapable of rational thought is a fact to which the illuminati have been made privy of late by the babbling of eminent psychologists. Granted. But let us not rashly assume that, above the level where genuine thinking begins, it goes on, level by level, to greater and greater heights of clarity and acumen. Nothing of the sort. The curve goes upward for a while, but then it flattens, and finally it dips sharply. Thinking, indeed, is so recent an accomplishment phylogenctically that man is capable of it only in a narrow area. To one side lie the almost instinctive cerebral tropisms and peristaltic motions of the simple; to the other side lie the complex but wholly irrational speculations of metaphysicians. Between a speech by a Grand Goblin of the Rotary Club and a philosophical treatise by an American Neo-Realist there is no more to choose than between the puling of an infant and the puling of a veteran of the Mexican War. Both show the cerebrum overloaded; both, strictly speaking, are idiotic.
Critics on Themselves.—The esteemed Nation has been publishing a series of articles written by various critics wherein the latter seek to analyze themselves that their followers may know what manner of men they are and the nature of the fonts of viewpoint and prejudice from which their judgments spring. An excellent editorial idea, but of little actual soundness or value, and this despite the various critics’ unquestionable honesty in setting down the personal facts and deductions requested of them. It is next to impossible for any critic thoroughly to analyze himself fairly and squarely, that is, for any critic of the first grade. The first-rate critic may know himself in a vague way, and may be able to record that vagueness in terms of a deceptive literality and plausibility, but most of the qualities that go to make him the first-rate critic that he is inevitably elude his plumbing, for all its sincerity. One observes that in every one of the self-exposés that the Nation has thus far printed, the critic under his own microscope attempts to view himself through the eye not of a critic but through the eye of his lay reader, which is a very different thing. He presents the picture of himself not in terms of himself so much as in terms of that part of himself that is the normal, average man. He apologizes for those qualities in him that differentiate him from the normal, average man. Which constitutes a document approximately as valuable as a treatise by a normal, average man outlining those qualities and prejudices and points of view of his own that differ from those of the first-rate critic.
Usually when a critic essays self-analysis, he misses the real point of himself for the simple reason that neither he, nor anyone else, knows what it is. It is as impossible accurately to define the quality that makes the first-rate critic as it is to define the quality that makes the first-rate musician, or painter, or sculptor. It is easy to speak of intelligence, culture, background, experience, sympathy, sensitiveness, originality and so on, but these are merely rubberstamps, merely words. There have been critics possessed of all these qualities who have been second-rate critics. There have been critics who have possessed few of these qualities who have been first-rate critics. Great criticism is the product of a species of sleight-of-mind that tricks the most seeing eye and is to no little degree inexplicable. The critic of the Hoboken Űnkblatt may be able to lay bare the secrets of his personal craft and of his immortal soul, but Coleridge would be unable to if he tried a thousand years. The great critic no more knows why he is great than a seven-year-old chess prodigy knows why he is the expert that he happens to be. It is only the critics of the lower level who know why they are on that level. It is easier for men to know why they fail than for men to know why they succeed. Genius is ever a complete stranger to itself. It is reserved for mere talent alone to comprehend fully its loves and its hates.
Three British Playwrights.—While Mr. A. A. Milne is spending one-third of his time writing weakly humorous dialogue and the remaining two-thirds composing feuilletons indignantly denouncing nine-tenths of the British and American dramatic critics for not laughing themselves to death over it, one of his young English colleagues is concerning himself solely, and perhaps a trifle more relevantly, with fashioning as witty dialogue as the Anglo-American theatre has heard in the round of several seasons. If this second young Englishman were as apt in his fabrication of plays as he is in the manufacture of droll colloquy, one would be disposed to view him as a likely saviour of that London stage from which the spirit of finished light comedy seems lately to have evaporated. But the plays of Frederick Lonsdale show so much less invention and imagination than his verbal embroideries of those plays that one remembers them as one ever remembers a pleasant dinner party, recalling only the amiable conversation and not exactly remembering whether one had anything to eat or not. This, doubtless, is not at all bad: it may be Lonsdale’s deliberate dodge agreeably to talk one out of thinking of his plays. It may be his stratagem to take a time-worn theme and by handling it with a circumspect obviousness throw his dialogue, through sheer contrast, into doubly high relief. (I surely need not name a certain great dramatic genius who indulged in the same practice.) But whether it is or is not his stratagem, Lonsdale’s dialogic talent remains unmistakable. It is sophisticated without sophistication’s usual brashness; it is polished without the air of that type of polish which suggests only the painted canvas drawing-room of the London actor-manager stage; it is at times as witty as Wilde and as acutely observant in a plain, everyday way as our own Kin Hubbard. At times. At other times—of such we have a sample in “Spring Cleaning’” when the woman of the streets prattles wistfully of babies—he descends to the lowest depths of boobismus. To these depths, Lonsdale’s more experienced and somewhat older compatriot and fellow wit, Maugham, never descends. The latter, further, is a more skillful playwright than the former. Yet, peculiarly enough, he is a playwright who has never quite realized himself. He has all the qualities that should make him the first polite comedy writer of the present-day English theatre; he has salt and erudition, taste and dexterity, invention and viewpoint; yet an apparently inborn British conventionality contrives too often to reduce his high talents to the level of that conventionality. His themes are now and again brave, as in the instance of “Our Betters”; the writer himself is brave; but the British conventionality is there at bottom all the same despite the deceptive frosting of swagger and impudence. Maugham is as cosmopolitan a writer as England knows today, yet his cosmopolitanism ever flies the Union Jack at its masthead.
The Moral Kaleidoscope.—The bluer the nose, the greener the mind, the grayer the sense of beauty, the yellower the honor, the redder the indignation, and the more lavender the sex.
The Autobiography.—There is no such thing as an absolutely truthful autobiography. Every such work, though it may truthfully set down the discreditable facts, concerns itself ultimately with converting such discreditable facts into a compositely creditable picture of its author. There was never a writer of an autobiography who did not see to it that he emerged from that autobiography a picturesque and, for all his deficiencies, an appealing fellow.
A Mensa et Thoro.—From discussions by various eminent authorities, usually indignant, of the high divorce rate prevailing in the United States I dredge up the following theories as to the cause of the rapid decay of Christian monogamy among us:
1. That the movies, with their lascivious suggestions, are to blame.
2. That the cause lies in the decline of belief in the literal authority of the Holy Scriptures.
3. That the multiplication of delicatessen shops has destroyed home cooking, and so made for unbearable unhappiness at the domestic hearth.
4. That no woman ever truly loves her husband until she has had eight children.
5. That shyster lawyers are to blame.
6. That the steady fall in the price of Fords has enormously facilitated adultery.
7. That jazz is responsible.
8. That the judges in our courts are not Christians, or, if Christians, not honest and passionate ones.
9. That there would be no divorces if there were no yellow journals.
10. That it is too easy for women to get good jobs.
11. That the cheap sex magazines have done it.
12. That God is punishing the Republic for not joining the League of Nations.
13. That the education of women has caused them to take marriage lightly.
14. That the Republic is in decay, like Rome, and that the high divorce rate is but one symptom of it, others being bootlegging, the Ku Klux Klan, cheek-to-cheek dancing, mah jong, birth control and cocaine sniffing.
I could extend the list, of course, to a hundred articles, some of them highly ingenious, and a few not printable in a family paper. Unluckily, it is my impression, after long and hard study, that all of them are nonsensical. The high divorce rate in the United States, it seems to me, is chiefly if not wholly due to one single and simple cause—one so simple, indeed, that I marvel that all the legal and ecclesiastical bigwigs who labor the subject have so diligently overlooked it. That cause is the American custom of marrying for love. In countries where marriages are made by prudent third parties the divorce rate is negligible. In countries where, though romance is countenanced, it is never permitted to outweigh common sense, the divorce rate is still within bounds. But in countries where it is regarded as somehow discreditable to marry for anything but love—in such romantic and idealistic countries divorce is a pestilence. Of the countries of the third category the largest and most conspicuous is the American Republic, and it is precisely in the American Republic, as everyone knows, that divorce is resorted to most scandalously often.
The immovable objection to marriage for love alone is that it founds what is theoretically the most solid and permanent of relationships upon, not a conviction, but an emotion—and even professors of psychology must be aware by this time that the chief characteristic of an emotion is that it cannot last. True enough, it is apt to be followed, at least in those of emotional habit, by a series of other emotions, but there is not the slightest assurance that any of the series will resemble it in its effects upon practical conduct. It may happen, and it often does happen, that a woman, on ceasing to love her husband, begins to regard him with the genial fondness with which she regards her lap-dog, her pastor or her gossip, but it happens just as often that her love is followed by the quite foreign emotion of disgust, or even by that of hate. Then the marriage dies, and either the corpse remains in the house or there is a disorderly funeral in the divorce court.
In those countries where marriage is founded, not upon an emotion, but upon a conviction, or, at all events, upon a mixture of emotion and conviction, there is vastly less risk of disaster. For the considerations upon which the conviction is based may be demonstrated logically, and when they exist today it is pretty certain that they will also exist tomorrow. They are mainly, in practice, considerations of money, of family, of education, of position, of worldly prospects. These things, to be sure, may change in time, but it must be obvious that they are very much more apt to remain unchanged. Family is a fact that is virtually immovable; so is social position; so is education. Even money is more secure than any emotion ever heard of; it is enormously more secure than the fragile emotion of love, which is founded, at best, upon illusion far more than upon reality. A man in love is simply one who believes that his inamorata is more charming than she is in fact. To deceive him equally about her family, her education, her social traditions, her worldly means—in brief, about any of the durable qualities that lie outside her mere physical charm—would be as difficult as to deceive him about her color. If he kept his mind on these things, he would seldom make a mistake. But looking only at the gal, he is often led into a disaster which wrecks his happiness, dissipates his estate, and makes him a public laughing-stock.
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