The Truth-Seeker
From the same, p. 274
THE MAN who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell.
The Relative
From the same, pp. 275–76. First printed in the Smart Set,
Aug., 1919, p.63
THE NORMAL man’s antipathy to his relatives, particularly of the second degree, is explained by psychologists in various tortured and improbable ways. The true explanation, I venture, is a good deal simpler. It lies in the plain fact that every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself. They exhibit his qualities in disconcerting augmentation or diminution; they fill him with a disquieting feeling that this, perhaps, is the way he appears to the world, and so they wound his amour propre and give him intense discomfort.
The Relative-in-Law
From the Smart Set, March, 1920, p. 50
A MAN dislikes his wife’s relatives for the same reason that he dislikes his own, to wit, because they appear to him as disgusting caricatures of one he holds in respect and affection, to wit his wife. Of them all, his mother-in-law is obviously the most offensive, for she not only burlesques his wife; she also foreshadows what his wife will probably become. The vision naturally sickens him. Sometimes, perhaps, the thing is more subtle. That is to say, his wife herself may be the caricature—say of a younger and prettier sister. In this case, being tied to his wife, he may come to detest the sister—as one always detests a person who symbolizes one’s failure and one’s slavery.
The Friend
From PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES, 1922, pp. 276–77.
First printed in the Smart Set, July, 1919, p. 67
A MAN of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology. They become threadbare, shabby, pumped-up, irritating, depressing. They convert themselves from living realities into moribund artificialities, and stand in sinister opposition to freedom, self-respect and truth. It is as corrupting to preserve them after they have grown fly-blown and hollow as it is to keep up the forms of passion after passion itself is a corpse. A prudent man, remembering that life is short, gives an hour or two, now and then, to a critical examination of his friendships. He weighs them, edits them, tests the metal of them. A few he retains, perhaps with radical changes in their terms. But the majority he expunges from his minutes and tries to forget, as he tries to forget the cold and clammy loves of year before last.
The Philosopher
From THE HUMAN MIND, PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, p. 85
THERE is no record in human history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend. Many of them have committed suicide; many others have turned their children out of doors and beaten their wives. And no wonder. If you want to find out how a philosopher feels when he is engaged in the practise of his profession, go to the nearest zoo and watch a chimpanzee at the wearying and hopeless job of chasing fleas. Both suffer damnably, and neither can win.
The Altruist
From PERJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 205–06.
First printed in the Smart Set, March, 1920, p. 51
A LARGE part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one. This is especially true in family life. A man makes sacrifices to his wife’s desires, not because he greatly enjoys giving up what he wants himself, but because he would enjoy it even less to see her cutting a sour face across the dinner table.
The Iconoclast
From the same, pp. 139–40. First printed in the American Mercury,
Jan., 1924, p. 75
THE ICONOCLAST proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing—that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.
The Family Man
From the same, pp. 140–41
AGAIN, there is the bad author who defends his manufacture of magazine serials and movie scenarios on the ground that he has a wife, and is in honor bound to support her. I have seen a few such wives. I dispute the obligation.… As for the biological by-products of this fidelity, I rate them even lower. Show me 100 head of ordinary children who are worth one “Heart of Darkness,” and I’ll subside. As for “Lord Jim,” I would not swap it for all the brats born in Trenton, N.J., since the Spanish War.
The Bachelor
From the same, pp. 118–19. First printed in the Smart Set,
Sept., 1922, p. 43
AROUND every bachelor of more than thirty-five legends tend to congregate, chiefly about the causes of his celibacy. If it is not whispered that he is damaged goods, and hence debarred from marriage by a lofty concept of Service to the unborn, it is told under the breath that he was insanely in love at the age of twenty-six with a beautiful creature who jilted him for an insurance underwriter and so broke his heart beyond repair. Such tales are nearly always moonshine. The reason why the average bachelor of thirty-five remains a bachelor is really very simple. It is, in brief, that no ordinarily attractive and intelligent woman has ever made a serious and undivided effort to marry him.
The Good Man
From the same, pp. 199–200. First printed in the Smart Set,
July, 1923, p. 47
MAN, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect. If he shows one valuable quality, it is almost unheard of for him to show any other. Give him a head, and he lacks a heart. Give him a heart of a gallon capacity, and his head holds scarcely a pint. The artist, nine times out of ten, is a dead-beat and given to the debauching of virgins, so-called. The patriot is a bigot, and, more often than not, a bounder and a poltroon. The man of physical bravery is often on a level, intellectually, with a Baptist clergyman. The intellectual giant has bad kidneys and cannot thread a needle. In all my years of search in this world, from the Golden Gate in the West to the Vistula in the East, and from the Orkney Islands in the North to the Spanish Main in the South, I have never met a thoroughly moral man who was honorable.
The Eternal Male
In part from IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 77–78,
and in part from the Smart Set, Nov., 1919, p. 71
LISTEN to two or three boys talking among themselves; their gabble is almost wholly made up of boasting—about their prowess at games, their successes in school, the wealth and animal vigor of their fathers, the elegance of their homes. And as with males of tender years, so with males of greater growth. Man is, of all quadrupeds, at once the most vain and the most idiotic. A genuine popinjay, whatever that may be, is as a shrinking violet compared to him. He cannot imagine himself save as at the center of situations. He never opens his mouth without talking of himself. He never undertakes the most trivial act without attitudinizing and hocus-pocusing it. However banal the position in which he finds himself, he tries to make something singular and glorious of it. If, in one of his obscure and sordid combats with another imbecile, he chances to get the better of it, the fact fills him with such pride that he is like to bust. And if, instead of getting the better of it, he is floored by an adept blow with a length of gas-pipe, he takes almost the same lofty joy in his defeat and ignominy. Thus we have, on the one hand, the hero, and on the other hand, the martyr. Both are puerile and pr
eposterous fellows. Both are frauds.
The Slave
From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, p. 200.
First printed in the Smart Set, Nov., 1922, p. 52
DON’T tell me what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or what he submits to from his wife. Simply tell me how he makes his living. It is the safest and surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on this ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man.
III. WOMEN
The Feminine Mind
From IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 3–22
A MAN’S women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The marks of that so-called intuition are simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.
A man’s wife, true enough, may envy her husband certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul.
This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which passes under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to be taken seriously, never takes her heroes so. From the day of Jane Austen to the day of Selma Lagerlöf she has always got into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can’t recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.
That it should be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race, to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. Women, in fact, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true fundamentals of intelligence—in so far as they reveal a capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of delusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth—to that extent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. The essential traits and qualities of the male, the hall-marks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the hall-marks of the numskull. The caveman is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.
Here, of course, I do not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing whatsoever to the complex of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we call superior ability; all I mean to say is that this complex is impossible without the feminine contribution—that it is a product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of talent we see the opposite picture. They are commonly somewhat mannish, and shave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreño or Cosima Wagner. Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naïve and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalry-man, a theologian or a corporation director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber-stamps, which constitute the chief mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, or because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, or because he is privy to the minutiæ of some sordid and degrading business or profession. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of intelligence; they are, in fact, merely a congeries of petty tricks and antics, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match.
The whole mental baggage of the average business man, or even the average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men – I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures—without marveling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the chief business “geniuses” of the United States, reported in his old age that he had never heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men, and in a man’s world they were successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.
There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross and driveling concerns—that their very capacity to master and retain such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar incompetency of admittedly first-rate men for what are called practical concerns. One could not think of Aristotle multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundredweight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine him expert at bridge, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly divert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis found that an incapacity for such shabby expertness is visible in almost all first-rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They are puzzled by bookkeeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavor that see the average men’s highest performances, and are e
asily surpassed by men who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the Simidæ.
This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial character—which must inevitably appear to a barber as stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility—is a character that men of the first class share with women of the first, second and even third classes. One seldom hears of women succeeding in the occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning pianos, practising law, or writing editorials for newspapers—despite the circumstance that the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why they should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of magazines, or as managers of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity, and once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as everyone knows, the number of women actually practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 3