Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  But very few men are so idiotic that they are blind to the hollowness of such satisfactions. A husband, after all, spends relatively few hours of his life parading his wife, or even contemplating her beauty. What engages him far more often is the unromantic business of living with her—of listening to her conversation, of trying to fathom and satisfy her whims, or detecting and counteracting her plots against his ego, of facing with her the dull hazards and boredoms of everyday life. In the discharge of this business personal beauty is certainly not necessarily a help; on the contrary, it may be a downright hindrance, if only because it makes for the hollowest and least intelligent of all forms of vanity. Of infinitely more value is a quality that women too often neglect, to wit, the quality of simple amiability. The most steadily charming of all human beings, male or female, is the one who is tolerant, unprovocative, good-humored, kind. A man wants a show only intermittently, but he wants peace and comfort every day. And to get them, if he is sagacious, he is quite willing to sacrifice scenery.

  Clubs

  From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, p. 49

  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 sex appeal that no woman will pay any attention to them. Is it any wonder that the men one thus encounters in clubs are miserable creatures, and that they find their pleasure in such banal sports as playing cards, drinking highballs and talking politics?… The day a man’s mistress is married one always finds him at his club.

  Efficiency as Charm

  From MINORITY REPORT, 1956, p. 224.

  First printed in the Smart Set, July, 1919, p. 63

  The most steadily attractive of all human qualities is competence. One invariably admires a man who is good at his trade, whatever it must be—who understands its technic thoroughly, and surmounts its difficulties with ease, and gets substantial rewards for his labors, and is envied by his rivals. And in precisely the same way one admires a woman who, in a business-like and sure-handed way, has gone out and got herself a good husband, and persuaded him to be grateful for her condescension, and so made herself secure.

  Woman and the Artist

  From APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 240–43.

  First printed in the Smart Set, June, 1920, pp. 42–43

  Much gabble is to be found in the literature of the world upon the function of woman as inspiration, stimulant and agente provocateuse to the creative artist. I incline to think that there is little if any basis of fact in the theory. Women not only do not inspire creative artists to high endeavor; they actually stand firmly against every high endeavor that a creative artist initiates spontaneously. What a man’s women-folks almost invariably ask of him is that he be respectable—that he do something generally approved—that he avoid yielding to his aberrant fancies—in brief, that he sedulously eschew showing any sign of genuine genius. Their interest is not primarily in the self-expression of the individual, but in the well-being of the family, which means the safety of themselves. No sane woman would want to be the wife of such a man, say, as Nietzsche or Chopin. His mistress perhaps, yes—for a mistress can always move on when the weather gets too warm. But not a wife. I here speak by the book. Both Nietzsche and Chopin had plenty of mistresses, most of them hideous, but neither was ever able to get a wife.

  Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway, Wagner and Minna Planer, Molière and Armande Béjart—one might multiply instances almost endlessly. Minna, at least in theory, knew something of music; she was thus what romance regards as an ideal wife for Wagner. But instead of helping him to manufacture his masterpieces, she was for twenty-five years the chief impediment of their manufacture. “Lohengrin” gave her the horrors; she begged Richard to give up his lunacies and return to the composition of respectable cornet music. In the end he had to get rid of her in sheer self-defense. Once free, with nothing worse on his hands than the illicit affection of Cosima Liszt von Bülow, he produced music drama after music drama in rapid succession. Then, married to Cosima, he descended to the anticlimax of “Parsifal,” a truly tragic mixture of the stupendous and the banal, of work by genius and sinfonia domestica—a great man dying by inches, smothered by the smoke of French fried potatoes, deafened by the wailing of children, murdered in his own house by the holiest of passions.

  Sentimentalists always bring up the case of Schumann and his Clara in rebuttal. But does it actually rebut? I doubt it. Clara, too, perpetrated her attentat against art. Her fair white arms, lifting from the keyboard to encircle Roberts neck, squeezed more out of him than mere fatuous smirks. He had the best head on him that music had seen since Beethoven’s day; he was, on the cerebral side, a colossus; he might have written music of the very first order. Well, what he did write was piano music—some of it imperfectly arranged for orchestra. The sad eyes of Clara were always upon him. He kept within the limits of her intelligence, her prejudices, her wifely love. No grand experiments with the orchestra. No superb leapings and cavortings. No rubbing of sandpaper over critical ears. Robert lived and died a respectable musical Hausvater. He was a man of genuine genius—but he didn’t leave ten lines that might not have been passed by old Prof. Jadassohn.

  The truth is that, no matter how great the domestic concord and how lavish the sacrifices a man makes for his women-folk, they almost always regard him secretly as a silly and selfish fellow, and cherish the theory that it would be easily possible to improve him. This is because the essential interests of men and women are eternally antithetical. A man may yield over and over again, but in the long run he must occasionally look out for himself—and it is these occasions that his women-folk remember. The typical domestic situation shows a woman trying to induce a man to do something that he doesn’t want to do, or to refrain from something that he does want to do. This is true in his bachelor days, when his mother or his sister is his antagonist. It is preëminently true just before his marriage, when the girl who has marked him down is hard at the colossal job of overcoming his reluctance. And after marriage it is so true that there is hardly need to state it. One of the things every man discovers to his disquiet is that his wife, after the first play-acting is over, regards him essentially as his mother used to regard him—that is, as a self-worshiper who needs to be policed and an idiot who needs to be protected. The notion that women admire their men-folks is pure moonshine. The most they ever achieve in that direction is to pity them.

  Martyrs

  From IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 155–56

  The civilized woman is born half convinced that she is really as weak and heavily put upon as she later pretends to be, and the prevailing folklore offers her endless corroboration. One of the resultant phenomena is the delight in martyrdom that one so often finds in women, and particularly in the least alert and introspective of them. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in suffering; they like to picture themselves as slaughtered saints. Thus they always find something to complain of, and the very conditions of domestic life give them a superabundance of clinical material. If, by any chance, such material shows a falling off, they are uneasy and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct is not reasonably open to question, and she will invent mythical offences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she will be plunged into utmost misery and humiliation. This fact probably explains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not too bad, but too good. For public opinion among women, remember, does not favor the woman who is full of a placid contentment and has
no masculine torts to report; if she says that her husband is wholly satisfactory she is looked upon as a numskull even more dense than he is himself. A man, speaking of his wife to other men, always praises her extravagantly. Boasting about her soothes his vanity; he likes to stir up the envy of his fellows. But when two women talk of their husbands it is mainly atrocities that they describe. The most esteemed woman gossip is the one with the longest and most various repertoire of complaints.

  Issue

  1

  From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, p. 112

  It is still believed, apparently, that there is something mysteriously laudable about achieving viable offspring. I have searched the sacred and profane scriptures for many years, but have yet to find any ground for this notion. To have a child is no more creditable than to have rheumatism—and no more discreditable. Ethically, it is absolutely meaningless. And practically, it is mainly a matter of chance.

  2

  From IN THE ROLLING MILLS, PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 248–58.

  First printed in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 5, 1923

  One of the most amusing things in life to a bachelor is the horror that overcomes his married friends whenever one of their children turns out to be intelligent. They feel instinctively that the phenomenon offers a challenge to their parental dignity and authority, and when the child they suspect actually is intelligent it certainly does. For the first thing the youngster who has succumbed to the un-Christian vice of thinking attempts is a critical examination of its surroundings, and directly in the forefront of those surroundings stand the unfortunate composers of its being. The result, only too frequently, is turmoil and disaster at the domestic hearth. Even the most enlightened instruments of the Life Force are full of alarms when their progeny respond to Mendel’s law: the very vigor and independence of judgment which they regard as their own most precious possession affrights them when it appears in their issue. I could tell some curious tales in point, but had better refrain. Suffice it to mention an old friend, extremely shrewd and realistic in all of his thinking, who was happily proud of his intelligent daughter until, at the age of sixteen, she threatened to get a job in a hat-shoppe if he sent her, as he promised, to a finishing-school. Then he collapsed in horror, despite the plain fact that her ultimatum was an excellent proof of the intelligence that he was proud of. As man, he admired her differentiation from the mass. But as father he was made uneasy by her sharp departure from normalcy.

  The great majority of American fathers, of course, have a great deal less fundamental sense than this one, who quickly recovered from his instinctive reaction, and ended, indeed, by boasting that his daughter had spurned the finishing-school at his advice. To this majority education can only mean the inculcation, by intensive torture, of all the superstitions and prejudices that they cherish themselves. When little Felix comes home to his patriotic and Christian home with the news that the Fathers of 1776 were a gang of smugglers and profiteers, and when his sister Flora follows with the news that Moses did not write his own obituary and that the baby, Gustave, was but recently indistinguishable from a tadpole, and later on from a nascent gorilla—when such subversive and astounding doctrines are brought home from the groves of learning there ensues inevitably a ringing of fire-bells, with a posse on the march against some poor pedagogue.

  The Burnt Child

  From APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, p. 244.

  First printed in the Smart Set, Sept., 1919, p. 43

  Marriage shakes a man’s confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He never quite trusts himself thereafter.

  On Connubial Bliss

  From the Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1927

  That something is wrong with the ancient estate of holy matrimony, so long in high esteem in the world, seems to be the unanimous view of all the self-constituted experts upon the subject, male and female, who now rage through the Republic. My mail is filled with the fulminations of these professors, many of whom appear to believe that, because I happen to be a bachelor by the grace of God, I am also a contemner of connubial bliss, and even an advocate of free love, that dreadful wickedness. The females among them, I observe without surprise, mainly argue that the American wife and mother of today is a slave, and ought to be set free. The males, going counter to this revelation, argue that the husband and father is a slave, and ought to be set free.

  Most of these evangelists, naturally enough, back up their projects with concrete legislation, and not a little of it is already before the great and good men who make our so-called laws. The bills thus proposed by the more savage sort of suffragettes, if they are ever enacted, will reduce the ancient lord and master of the family to a rôle both onerous and ignominious. Whenever his lady, after consultation with her familiars (chiefly, I take it, spinsters) decides to favor posterity, he will be summoned. His duty done, he will be dismissed. Meanwhile, his whole earnings will be hers, to dispose of as she pleases, and the child or children issuing from her condescension will be completely under her control.

  The partisans of the male are no less revolutionary. As things stand, they argue, an American husband is already so far gone in slavery that he has scarcely any rights at all. While his marriage endures his property, like his life, is at the mercy of his wife, and when she throws him out she is able, under our laws, to make off with nine-tenths of it in the form of alimony. They propose to get rid of this curse by abolishing alimony—or, at all events, by restricting its payment to ex-wives who are actually helpless and in need. The rest, they argue, can work, as their husbands must work. If there are children, they can help to support them. No other scheme, it appears, is equitable.

  Unluckily, I find myself out of sympathy with most of these reformers, and especially with those of the suffragette wing. Where they run aground is in mistaking the nature of marriage. They seem to believe that it is a purely contractual relation and that its terms, in consequence, may be changed like those of any other contractual relations—either by free bargaining, or by duress of law. It is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Marriage is not a contract; it is a way of life. Its essence, when it is sound, is a complete surrender of many of the natural rights of the individual. It is not comparable to buying an automobile or joining the Elks; it is comparable to entering a monastery or enlisting for war.

  Most of the malaises that now afflict it among us are palpably due, it seems to me, to imprudent efforts to change its unescapable terms. Of such sort are all the dodges that sentimentality has put upon the law books of late years, each and every one of them designed to lighten the alleged burdens of the wife. Have they actually benefited wives? I doubt it. They have simply increased the number of rebellious and fugitive husbands. For they are all based upon the assumption that the husband dislikes his wife, and is trying to escape from her clutches. So long as that assumption is false they are supererogatory and insulting. And the moment it becomes true they are useless. Here, as in other fields, legislation is mainly nonsense. Its basic theory seems to be that when a man is uncomfortable and trying to rid himself of the things that make him so, the way to cure him is to make him more uncomfortable. Human nature, I fear, does not really work in that manner. So long as a man loves his wife and children, there is no need of laws to make him support and cherish them; he will do it at any cost to himself. Contrariwise, when he hates the one and is indifferent to the other, no conceivable law can wring out of him the full measure, nor even a tenth measure, of the devotion that he owes to them.

  The trouble with the divorce laws in most American states, it seems to me, is not that they facilitate the breakup of marriages, but that they make it difficult, and often almost impossible, to break up marriages completely. The average decree, far from resolving the matter, is simply the beginning of even worse raids and forays than those that have gone before. The wi
fe has a claim on her husband’s property—not infrequently a very vexatious and burdensome claim—and the husband continues to have a vested interest in his wife’s conduct. Each can annoy the other, and three times out of four they do so. The worst hatreds that I have ever encountered in this world issued out of just such post-connubial combats.

  Are they unavoidable? I don’t think so. They could be avoided by abandoning half measures for whole ones—that is, by making every divorce complete and absolute, with each party restored to the status quo ante, and neither, in consequence, with any claim on the other. But suppose the wife has no means of support? Then let her find one: women without husbands have to do it. If marriage has been simply her device for making a living, and nothing more, then let her marry again, just as a lady of joy, losing one client, seeks another. Certainly it is unfair to ask her husband to go on paying for services that he is no longer getting.

  But the children? My belief is that their sufferings are far more poignant in moral statistics than they are in real life. In nine divorce cases out of ten, no children are heard of. When they exist, they have been grossly damaged already, and perhaps incurably. Their disposition should not be beyond the talents of a judge of reasonable sense. In cases wherein neither of their parents volunteers to care for them, prudence will suggest sending them to some comfortable orphan asylum or reformatory, where they will at least encounter decenter adults than they have been living with.