Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Dr. Welch was hardly more than five feet six inches in height, but he must have weighed close to 200 pounds. With his broad brow, fine eyes and closely-clipped beard, he was a very distinguished-looking man, yet it would have been difficult to prove legally that he had a neck. His massive head, in fact, sat directly on his sturdy chest, and a foot below it there were the beginnings of a majestic paunch. This is the build, according to the professors of such matters, that offers ideal soil for a long list of incurable malaises. It spells high blood-pressure, kidney deterioration and heart disease. When it is combined with a distaste for exercise, a habit of sitting up until all hours of the night and an enlightened appreciation of each and every variety of sound food and drink, it is tantamount, so we are told, to being sentenced to die in the electric-chair at 45. Yet Dr. Welch lived 14 years and 22 days beyond the canonical three-score and ten and had a grand time to the end. And when he died at last it was not of any of the diseases his colleagues had been warning him against for 60 years.

  A year or so before his death I happened to sit beside him one day at lunch. The main dish was country ham and greens, and of it he ate a large portion, washing it down with several mugs of beer. There followed lemon meringue pie. He ate an arc of at least 75 degrees of it, and eased it into his system with a cup of coffee. Then he lighted a six-inch panatela and smoked it to the butt. And then he ambled off to attend a medical meeting and to prepare for dinner. The night before, so I gathered from his talk, he had been to a banquet, and sat until 11.30 listening to bad speeches and breathing tobacco smoke. The wines had been good enough for him to remember them and mention them. Returning to his bachelor quarters, he had read until 1 o’clock and then turned in. The morning before our meeting he had devoted to meditation in an easy-chair, cigar in hand. At the lunch itself, I forgot to say, he made a speech, beginning in English and finishing in German.

  What are we to gather, brethren, from Dr. Welch’s chart? Simply that pathology is still far from an exact science, especially in the department of forecasting. In the presence of what are assumed to be causes the expected effects do not always or necessarily follow. Here was a man who stood in the very front rank of the medical profession, and yet his whole life was a refutation of some of its most confident generalizations. He lived to be pallbearer to scores of colleagues who made 36 holes of golf a week a religious rite, and to scores more who went on strict diets at 30 and stuck to them heroically until they died at 50 or 60.

  Comfort for the Ailing

  From the American Mercury, March, 1930, pp. 288–89

  TO the gods who run the cosmos, disease and health probably look pretty much alike. I am not, of course, privy to the secret lucubrations of Yahweh, but it is certainly imaginable that a hearty, incandescent boil gives Him quite as much satisfaction as a damask cheek, and maybe a great deal more. The boil, I suspect, is harder to fashion, if only because it is more complex, and hence it must be more stimulating to the artist. As for a carcinoma, a strangulated hernia or a case of paralysis agitans, it must needs fill its eminent Designer with a very soothing professional warmth. Second-rate gods, it is manifest, could never have invented such things. They show a high degree of ingenuity, and something hard to distinguish from esthetic passion.

  What is the thing called health? Simply a state in which the individual happens transiently to be perfectly adapted to his environment. Obviously, such states cannot be common, for the environment is in constant flux. Am I perfectly well today, with the temperature 55 and a light wind blowing? Then I can’t be perfectly well tomorrow, with the mercury at 30, and a wild gale roaring out of the North. Moreover, I am abstemious today, for it is my saint’s day, and in consequence my poor duodenum is quiescent; tomorrow will be my Uncle Wolfgang’s birthday, and I must gorge and guzzle. A week hence, according to the insurance actuaries, the chances are one in so many that my heart will begin to cut capers, for I am getting into the age for it. Twenty years hence it is at least a ten to one bet that I’ll be stuffed and in the National Museum at Washington. And so, as they say, it goes.

  Uninterrupted health is probably possible only to creatures of very simple structure, beginning, say, with the Rhizopoda and running up to schoolboys. They have little conflict with their environment, for they make few demands upon it. So long as it does not bombard them in a gross and overwhelming manner, like a falling house, they are scarcely conscious of it. But on higher levels there is a vastly greater sensitiveness, and so there is much more illness. History tells us of few really distinguished men who were completely healthy: the biography of the high-toned is always largely concerned with aches and malaises. In the great days of the Greeks only the athletes were good insurance risks—and of the athletes, then as now, we hear nothing save that they were athletes. There must have been thousands of them, first and last, but not one of them, as he grew older, ever amounted to anything. No doubt the average hero of the games spent his last days keeping a wine-shop or serving as night-watchman at the Academy. Meanwhile, the philosophers pored over the works of Hippocrates, and were steady customers of all the quacks who swarmed in from the East.

  Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it; for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog. The laws of the cosmos seem to be as little concerned about human felicity as the laws of the United States are concerned about human decency. Whoever set them in motion apparently had something quite different in mind—something that we cannot even guess at. The very life of man seems to be no more than one of their inconsidered by-products. One may liken it plausibly to the sparks that fly upward when a blacksmith fashions a horse-shoe. The sparks are undoubtedly more brilliant than the horse-shoe, but all the while they remain secondary to it. If the iron could speak, it would probably complain of them as a disease. In the same way, I daresay, man is a disease of the cosmos.… But here I begin to argue in a circle, for I started out by suggesting that disease itself may be only a higher form of normalcy. Perhaps I had better shut down.

  Eugenic Note

  From the same, June, 1924, pp. 188–89

  HAS anyone ever given credit to the Black Death for the Renaissance—in other words, for modern civilization? I can find no mention of any such theory in the books; most of them try to make it appear, vaguely and unpersuasively, that the Renaissance was somehow set off by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But how could the fall of one of the most civilized of cities have stimulated the progress of civilization? Somehow, I detect a non sequitur here. Other authorities allege that the Renaissance began when scholars from the East appeared at Rome, some of them from Constantinople and some from other places: this, we are told, was about the year 1400. But there is really very little evidence for the fact. Scholars from the East had been familiar to the Romans for at least a thousand years, and yet they had left few marks upon Italian thought. Moreover, the Renaissance, when it got under way at last, was carried forward, not by scholars from the East, but by Italians. All the great names of the time, in every field from architecture to politics, are Western, not Eastern. There is, indeed, no more evidence in the records that scholars from the East had anything to do with the business than there is that Sioux Indians had a hand in it. The Renaissance was thoroughly occidental; its greatest achievements would have been utterly unintelligible to an Eastern pundit. It did not revive and carry on a work dropped at Constantinople when the Turks approached; it began a work that Constantinople knew absolutely nothing about.

  But if Italians launched the Renaissance, with Germans and Frenchmen following after, then why did they wait until the Fourteenth Century to do it? If they were barbarians in the year 1300, how did they manage to convert themselves into highly civilized men—perhaps the most civilized ever seen on earth; certainly vastly more civilized than the grossly overrated Greeks—by 1450? Are we to assume that they
were suddenly inspired by God? Or that large numbers of them began to mutate in a De Vriesian manner, highly astonishing to the biologist? I do not believe that it is necessary to dally with any such theories. The Renaissance, it seems to me, is easily and sufficiently explained by the fact that the Black Death, raging from 1334 to 1351, exterminated such huge masses of the European proletariat that the average intelligence and enterprise of the race were greatly lifted, and that this purged and improved society suddenly functioned splendidly because it was no longer hobbled from below. For a thousand years the population of Europe had been steadily increasing, and its best men had been forced, in consequence, to devote themselves to the wasteful business of politics—the grabbing of new territories, the opening of markets, the policing of the proletariat. Their ability thus had no opportunity to function in a dignified and splendid manner; they were condemned to such dull, degrading tasks as harass United States Senators, generals in the Army, Tammany bosses, college presidents and captains of industry. Then, like a bolt from the blue, came the Black Death. In less than twenty years it reduced the population of Europe by at least 50% – and yet it left substantially all of the wealth of Europe untouched. More, it killed its millions selectively; the death-rate among the upper classes, as every Sunday-school scholar reading the Decameron of Boccaccio knows, was immensely less than the death-rate among the submerged. The net result was that Europe emerged from the pandemic with the old pressure of population relieved, all the worst problems of politics in abeyance, plenty of money, and a newly-found leisure. The best brains of the time, thus suddenly emancipated, began to function freely and magnificently. There ensured what we call the Renaissance.

  XXII. UTOPIAN FLIGHTS

  A Purge for Legislatures

  From PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, pp. 44–53. First printed in the American Mercury, Aug., 1926, pp. 414–16. I repeated my proposal in The Law-Making Racket, Baltimore Evening Sun, April 13, 1931

  A MOOD of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now. But isn’t the jury system itself imperfect? Isn’t it occasionally disgraced by gross abuse and scandal? Then so is the system of justice devised and ordained by the Lord God Himself. Didn’t He assume that the Noachian Deluge would be a lasting lesson to sinful humanity—that it would put an end to all manner of crime and wickedness, and convert mankind into a race of Presbyterians? And wasn’t Noah himself, its chief beneficiary, lying drunk, naked and uproarious within a year after the ark landed on Ararat? All I argue for the jury system, invented by man, is that it is measurably better than the scheme invented by God. It has its failures and its absurdities, its abuses and its corruptions, but taking one day with another it manifestly works. It is not the fault of juries that so many murderers go unwhipped of justice, and it is not the fault of juries that so many honest men are harassed by preposterous laws. The juries find the gunmen guilty: it is functionaries higher up, all politicians, who deliver them from the noose, and turn them out to resume their butcheries.

  So I propose that our Legislatures be chosen as our juries are now chosen—that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one. Let the constituted catchpolls then proceed swiftly to this man’s house, and take him before he can get away. Let him be brought into court forthwith, and put under bond to serve as elected, and if he cannot furnish the bond, let him be kept until the appointed day in the nearest jail.

  The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and so obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind—men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to do anything to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their reëlection.

  The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it. The great majority of public problems, indeed, are quite simple, and any man may be trusted to grasp their elements in ten days who may be—and is—trusted to unravel the obfuscations of two gangs of lawyers in the same time. In this department the so-called expertness of so-called experts is largely imaginary. My scheme would have the capital merit of barring them from the game. They would lose their present enormous advantages as a class, and so their class would tend to disappear.

  Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves in order to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects itself in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonorable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many? What I contend is simply that the number of such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of professional job-seekers than it is in any other class, or in the population in general. What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that population, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.

  Are juries ignorant? Then they are still intelligent enough to be entrusted with your life and mine. Are they venal? Then they are still honest enough to take our fortunes into their hands. Such is the fundamental law of the Germanic peoples, and it has worked for nearly a thousand years. I have launched my proposal that it be extended upward and onward, and the mood of constructive criticism passes from me. My plan belongs to any reformer who cares to lift it.

  A Chance for Millionaires

  From the New York Evening Mail, 1918

  ON the general stupidity and hunkerousness of millionaires a formidable tome might be written—a job I resign herewith to anyone diligent enough to assemble the facts. Not only do they gather in their assets by processes which never show any originality, but are always based upon a few banal principles of swindling; they also display the same lack of resource and ingenuity in getting rid of them. It is years since any American millionaire got his money in any new and stimulating way, and it is years since any American millionaire got rid of his money by any device worthy the admiration of connoisseurs.

  Setting aside the pathetic dullards who merely hang on to their accumulations, like dogs hoarding bones, the rich men of the Republic may be divided into two grand divisions, according to their varying notions of what is a goo
d time. Those in the first division waste their funds upon idiotic dissipation or personal display. They are the Wine Jacks, social pushers and horsy fellows—the Thaws, Goulds and so on. Those in the second division devote themselves to buying public esteem by gaudy charities and a heavy patronage of the arts and sciences. They are the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, et al.

  The second crowd, it seems to me, are even more dull and unimaginative than the first, and show less originality. One never hears of them doing anything new; they are forever imitating one another in something old. They build hospitals, or establish libraries, or collect works of art, or endow colleges, or finance some scientific institution or other—and after that their fancy is exhausted. John D. Rockefeller, probably the most intelligent of them, actually did nothing new with his billions. He staked a few charities, he trustified certain religious enterprises, he capitalized medical research—and that is all. Every one of these things had been done before. John did not invent them, and neither did he greatly improve them. The late John Pierpont Morgan I was even less original. The only use he could find for his money was to lavish it on art collections. With the passion of a miser piling up gold, he scoured the world for pictures, pots, furniture and fabrics, taking the good with the bad, and often, if rumor is to be believed, the bogus with the real. His accumulations finally surpassed those of all other men, living or dead. He was the champion of champions, the John L. Sullivan of art patrons. And then he died, and left all that chaos of beauty and ugliness to his son, who dispersed a large part of it, just as a less opulent son sells off his dead father’s wornout clothes.