Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Art Galleries

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 24, 1923

  IT will not surprise the faunal naturalist specializing in Homo sapiens to note that the chief argument currently adduced in favor of building a public art gallery in Baltimore is that the works of art now stored in cellars and garrets, beyond the voluptuous gaze of the plain people, are worth millions. No one, it appears, argues that they deserve to be exhumed and displayed on the bald ground that they are beautiful—which, in point of fact, is probably not true in most cases. The contention is simply this: that the money sunk in them by dead and forgotten collectors ought to be put to some productive use—that it is as immoral to keep them locked up as it would be to buy a $1,000 fur overcoat and then let it remain in the icebox. This, I take it, is the 100% American view of the nature and function of the fine arts.

  Well, perhaps it is as good as any other. The contrary view that beauty deserves cherishing and display for its own sweet sake would probably blow up, as I hint, if the treasures in question were actually examined. And the correlative view that public exhibitions of art have some occult power to mellow and uplift the human mind, and to fill it with esthetic passion—this notion does not survive analysis, even if it be assumed that every work of art is necessarily beautiful. The two great galleries in Paris probably house more celebrated paintings than are to be found anywhere else in the world, and yet, as everyone knows, the French people, and particularly the Parisians, show very little elevation of spirit and almost no esthetic sense. If you don’t believe this last, look into their shop-windows. The sort of beauty that they admire privately—in furniture, in pictures, in hangings and lighting fixtures, even in clothing—is precisely the sort of beauty that is cherished by a retired saloon-keeper.

  Is this a fair test? It is not only fair; it is the only fair one. For the esthetic tastes of an individual are to be determined, not by his occasional genuflexions before public displays of alleged masterpieces, but by the character of the private environment that he tries to create for himself. What sort of wallpaper has he hung on the walls of his dining-room? To what degree do his neckties match his shorts? What pictures does he put where he must see them every day? The answers to these questions are enormously more important than his record of attendance at art exhibitions, at least half of which offer no more actual beauty than a display of glass eyes.

  But only the rich can afford to buy beautiful things for themselves? Is it so, indeed? I deny it. The fact is that, even on the lowest planes, there is always a free choice between what is less ugly and what is more ugly, and that choosing the better costs no more than choosing the worse. Furniture of reasonably decent design and material doesn’t cost a cent more than the frightful stuff sold by the instalment houses. Reproductions of good pictures cost no more than the gilt-framed abominations in the department stores. Good wallpaper, simple and sound in color, is actually much cheaper than a bad wallpaper, with its florid designs and intolerable clashes. In sum, the expense of fitting out an ordinary dwelling house in a harmonious and charming manner is not a dollar above fitting it out like the studio of a fortune-teller. Moreover, all persons of even rudimentary taste are well aware of it. Everyone knows dignified and pleasing houses in which there is not the slightest sign of heavy expenditure. And everyone knows expensive houses that are hideous.

  It is, indeed, simply impossible to imagine a genuine lover of beautiful things who does not make some attempt to get them into his immediate surroundings, just as it is impossible to imagine a genuine lover of music who does not try to make it. Let a man gabble about art day in and day out and know all the public collections by heart—and if his own home is unmitigatedly ugly, then his frenzy for beauty is fraudulent. Let him subscribe to all public funds for the preservation of bad paintings and worse statuary—and if he wears a green necktie with a blue shirt, then he remains a Philistine.

  Two grave defects lie in all public art galleries. The first is the defect that the varieties of beautiful objects which they show—chiefly costly paintings and even more costly antiques of other sorts—lie quite beyond the acquisitive aspiration of the average man, and so send him away with the false notion that beauty is not for him. In other words, they fail at their primary business of inducing him to cherish and increase beauty himself. The other defect is that nine-tenths of the objects they show are actually not beautiful at all, but merely curious and expensive. They are gathered, it would seem. on the principle that if a given artist ever created anything of genuine beauty, then everything else he created is beautiful. This is precisely like admiring Mendelssohn’s Reformation symphony on the ground that he also wrote the Scotch.

  Suppose orchestras constantly played the former and never the latter? Yet that is the sort of fare that a provincial art gallery in a young country must inevitably offer, principally and often exclusively. The genuine masterpieces of painting and sculpture are beyond its reach. It must content itself with third-rate pictures, a great many of them mere forgeries. Looking at them is not immersing one’s self in beauty; it is mere yokelish gaping, like looking at George Washington’s false teeth.1

  Art and Nature

  From THE ARTISTS’ MODEL, PREJUDICES:

  FOURTH SERIES, 1924, p. 140

  THE DOCTRINE that art is an imitation of nature is full of folly. Nine-tenths of all the art that one encounters in this world is actually an imitation of other art. Fully a half of it is an imitation twice, thrice or ten times removed. The true artist, in fact, is seldom an accurate observer of nature; he leaves that gross and often revolting exploration to geologists, engineers and anatomists. The last thing he wants to see is a beautiful woman in the bright, pitiless sunlight.

  The Artist

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 7, 1924

  IT is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist. The special quality which makes an artist of him might almost be defined, indeed, as an extraordinary capacity for irritation, a pathological sensitiveness to environmental pricks and stings. He differs from the rest of us mainly because he reacts sharply and in an uncommon manner to phenomena which leave the rest of us unmoved, or, at most, merely annoy us vaguely. He is, in brief, a more delicate fellow than we are, and hence less fitted to prosper and enjoy himself under the conditions of life which he and we must face alike. Therefore, he takes to artistic endeavor, which is at once a criticism of life and an attempt to escape from life.

  So much for the theory of it. The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot. From Dante to Tolstoy and from Shakespeare to Mark Twain the story is ever the same. Names suggest themselves instantly: Goethe, Heine, Shelley, Byron, Thackeray, Balzac, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Carlyle, Moliè, Pope—all bitter critics of their time and nation, most of them piously hated by the contemporary 100 percenters, some of them actually fugitives from rage and reprisal.

  Dante put all of the patriotic Italians of his day into Hell, and showed them boiling, roasting and writhing on hooks. Cervantes drew such a devastating picture of the Spain that he lived in that it ruined the Spaniards. Shakespeare made his heroes foreigners and his clowns Englishmen. Goethe was in favor of Napoleon. Rabelais, a citizen of Christendom rather than of France, raised a cackle against it that Christendom is still trying in vain to suppress. Swift, having finished the Irish and then the English, proceeded to finish the whole human race. The exceptions are few and far between, and not many of them will bear examination. So far as I know, the only eminent writer in English history who was also a 100% Englishman, absolutely beyond suspicion, was Samuel Johnson. The Ku Klux of his day gave him a clean bill of health; he was
the Roosevelt of the Eighteenth Century. But was Johnson actually an artist? If he was, then a cornet-player is a musician. He employed the materials of one of the arts, to wit, words, but his use of them was hortatory, not artistic. Johnson was the first Rotarian: living today, he would be a United States Senator, or a university president. He left such wounds upon English prose that it was a century recovering from them.

  The Greenwich Village Complex

  From the American Mercury, June, 1925

  A BAD artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. Hence Dadaism, Vortism, and all the rest of that sort of buncombe. No really good new formula, it must be obvious, has ever come out of a bad artist—which is to say, out of an artist who could not do good work within the old formulæ. Among the so-called “modern” musicians, the only ones worthy of any respect are those who have proved their right to be revolutionaries by writing sound fugues. Among the advanced poets who now bray in every cellar the only genuinely amusing ones are those who have sound sonnets behind them. The rest are frauds—and bores.

  Reflection on the Drama

  From PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES, 1922, pp. 299–309.

  First printed in the Smart Set, Dec., 1920, pp. 47–50

  THE DRAMA (counting in the movie and the radio as part of it) is the most democratic of the art forms, and perhaps the only one that may legitimately bear the label. Painting, sculpture, music and literature, so far as they show any genuine esthetic or intellectual content at all, are not for crowds, but for selected individuals, mostly with bad kidneys and worse morals, and three of the four are almost always enjoyed in actual solitude. Even architecture and religious ritual, though they are publicly displayed, make their chief appeal to man as individual, not to man as mass animal. One goes into a church as part of a crowd, true enough, but if it be a church that has risen above mere theological disputation to the beauty of ceremonial, one is, even in theory, alone with the Lord God Jehovah. And if, passing up Fifth avenue in the 5 o’clock throng, one pauses before St. Thomas’s to drink in the beauty of that archaic facade, one’s drinking is almost sure to be done a cappella; of the other passers-by, not one in a thousand so much as glances at it.

  But the drama, as representation, is inconceivable save as a show for the mob, and so it has to take on protective coloration to survive. It must make its appeal, not to individuals as such, nor even to individuals as units in the mob, but to the mob as mob—a quite different thing, as Gustav Le Bon long ago demonstrated in his “Psychologie des Foules.” Thus its intellectual content, like its esthetic form, must be within the mental grasp of the mob, and what is more important, within the scope of its prejudices. Per corollary, anything even remotely approaching an original idea, or an unpopular idea, is foreign to it and abhorrent to it. The best a dramatist can hope to do is to give poignant and arresting expression to an idea so simple that the average man will grasp it at once, and so banal that he will approve it in the next instant.

  So much for the theory. An appeal to the facts quickly substantiates it. The more one looks into the so-called drama of ideas of the last age—that is, into the acting drama—the more one is astounded by the vacuity of its content. The younger Dumas’s “La Dame aux Camélias,” the Stammvater of all the “problem” and propaganda plays that have raged since 1852, is based upon the sophomoric thesis that a prostitute is a human being like you and me, and suffers the slings and arrows of the same sorrows, and may be potentially quite as worthy of Heaven. Augier’s “La Mariage d’Olympe” (1854), another pioneer, is even hollower; its four acts are devoted to rubbing in the revolutionary discovery that it is unwise for a young man of good family to marry an elderly cocotte. Proceed now to Ibsen. Here one finds the same tasteless platitudes—that it is unpleasant for a wife to be treated as a doll; that professional patriots and town boomers are frauds; that success in business is often grounded upon a mere willingness to do what a man of honor is incapable of; that a woman who continues to live with a debauched husband may expect to have unhealthy children; that a joint sorrow tends to bring husband and wife together; that a neurotic woman is apt to prefer death to maternity; that a man of 55 is an ass to fall in love with a flapper of 17. Do I burlesque? If you think so, turn to Ibsen’s “Nachgelassene Schriften” and read his own statements of the ideas in his social dramas—read his own succinct summaries of their theses. Such “ideas” are what one finds in newspaper editorials, speeches before Congress, sermons by fashionable divines—in brief, in the literature expressly addressed to those persons whose distinguishing mark is that ideas never enter their heads.

  Ibsen himself, and excellent poet and a reflective man, was under no delusions about his “dramas of ideas.” It astounded him greatly when the sentimental German middle-classes hailed “Ein Puppenheim” as a revolutionary document; he protested often and bitterly against being mistaken for a prophet of feminism. His own interest in this play and in those that followed it was chiefly technical; he was trying to displace the well-made play of Scribe and company with something simpler, more elastic and more hospitable to character. He wrote “Ghosts” to raise a laugh against the fools who had seen something novel and horrible in the idea of “A Doll’s House”; he wanted to prove to them that that idea was no more than a platitude. Soon afterward he became thoroughly disgusted with the whole “drama of ideas.” In “The Wild Duck” he cruelly burlesqued it, and made a low-comedy Ibsenist his chief butt. In “Hedda Gabler” he played a joke on the Ibsen fanatics by fashioning a first-rate drama out of the oldest, shoddiest materials of Sardou, Feuillet, and even Meilhac and Halévy. And beginning with “Little Eyolf” he threw the “drama of ideas” overboard forever, and took to mysticism. What could be more comical than the efforts of critical talmudists to read a thesis into “When We Dead Awaken”? I have put in many a gay hour perusing their commentaries. Ibsen, had he lived, would have roared over them—as he roared over the effort to inject portentous meanings into “The Master Builder,” at bottom no more than a sentimental epitaph on a love affair that he himself had suffered at 60.

  The notion that there are ideas in the “drama of ideas,” in truth, is confined to a special class of illuminati, whose chief visible character is their capacity for ingesting nonsense. The mob rules in the theater, and so the theater remains infantile and trivial—a scene, not of the exposure of ideas, nor even of the exhibition of beauty, but one merely of the parading of mental and physical prettiness and vulgarity. It is at its worst when its dramatists seek to corrupt this function by adding a moral or intellectual purpose. It is at its best when it confines itself to the unrealities that are its essence, and swings amiably from the romance that never was on land or sea to the buffoonery that is at the bottom of all we actually know of human life. Shakespeare was its greatest craftsman: he wasted no tortured ratiocination upon his plays. Instead, he filled them with the gaudy heroes that all of us see ourselves becoming on some bright tomorrow, and the lowly frauds and clowns we are today. No psychopathic problems engaged him; he took love and ambition and revenge and braggadocio as he found them. He held no clinics in dingy Norwegian apartment-houses: his field was Bohemia, glorious Rome, the Egypt of the scene-painter, Arcady.… But even Shakespeare, for all the vast potency of his incomparable, his stupefying poetry, could not long hold the talmudists out in front from their search for invisible significances. Think of all the tomes that have been written upon the profound and revolutionary “ideas” in the moony musings of the schizophrenic sophomore, Hamlet of Denmark!

  Actors

  From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, pp. 40–44.

  First printed in the Smart Set, Jan., 1917, p. 269

  “IN France they call an actor a m’as-tu-vu, which, anglicized, 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 art of the mime by the editor of a magazine devoted to the stage. The learned author ev
ades 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 Rotary 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.

  But why are actors, in general, such blatant and obnoxious posturers and wind-bags? Why is it as surprising to find an unassuming and intelligent 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 alert, ingenious, ambitious young fellow? Is he the 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. He seeks in the world, 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 pretty one.