Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  Another thing I learned was that it was quite as easy, and a good deal more pleasant, to lay bricks in a good design as it was to lay them in a bad design. Do bricklayers know it? Do they take any actual delight in their craft? I believe fully that the better ones do. An architect once told me that every effort he made to use bricks beautifully, no matter how vexatious the technical problems it involved, met a hearty response from them, and eager coöperation—that they delighted in matching the colors of the new tapestry bricks, and worked joyfully on a fine chimney. Unluckily, they seldom get the chance. Nine-tenths of the work they do for a living is shoddy—the uninspiring laying of bad bricks in inept and feeble designs. What could be more tiresome than running up a high blank wall? Or than encasing a skyscraper in its thin and puerile skin of clay? The only brickwork that can imaginably satisfy an honest bricklayer is honest brickwork—brickwork that stands upon its own bottom, and is precisely what it pretends to be. The main arch of that movie-parlor occupied four or five bricklayers for several days. It was a genuine arch, not a fake concealing concrete, and their delight in it was obvious. All day long their foreman hovered over them, watching every brick as it went into place, and buzzing all over the scaffolding with his blue-print and his level. I saw him regarding it from across the street when it was done, and the false work had been taken away. There was no mean satisfaction in his face, and it was no mean feat that satisfied him.

  The Rewards of Virtue

  From the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 1926

  The dream of the Socialists, if any survive, is now realized among us, and even exceeded: bricklayers and plasterers are getting better pay than college professors. I am certainly no Socialist myself, but somehow this consummation gives me agreeable sensations. Is it foul, preposterous, inequitable, and against God? If so, on what ground? I know, like most men of my trade and interests, something about college professors, but, rather unusually, I also know something about bricklayers. My belief is that the latter are far more useful than the former, and that, taking one with another, they are also far more amiable and amusing fellows.

  The pedagogue, being excessively literate, has long poisoned the world with highfalutin tosh about his high dignity and consequence, and especially about his altruism. He is commonly regarded, even by those who ought to know better, as a hero who has made vast sacrifices for the good of the rising generation and the honor of learning. He is, in fact, seldom anything of the sort. He is simply a lazybones who has taken to the birch in order to escape implements of a greater laboriousness. The rising generation is not his pet, but simply his oyster. And he has no more respect for learning, in his average incarnation, than a congressman has for statecraft or a Prohibition agent or lawyer for law.

  The world’s stock of knowledge is seldom augmented by pedagogues; far more often they oppose its increase in a violent and implacable manner. Turn to physics or metaphysics, as you please. How many of the salient philosophers have been professors of philosophy? Probably not twenty per cent. And how much of the recent advance in the physical sciences is due to men professionally devoted to teaching them? So little that it is hard to detect it. During the last quarter of a century chemistry has been completely overhauled. The axioms that it was grounded on in 1900 are now all abandoned. But at least three-fourths of the chemistry teachers of America are still teaching the chemistry of 1900, as nine-tenths of the literature teachers are still teaching the literary principles and ideas of 1885.

  The pedagogue, however, is not my theme; what I presume to argue is that the rewards that men get in this world, taking averages, run with their merit and value as members of society, and that those who are badly paid are usually paid very justly. The doctrine to the contrary is widespread, and upsetting it would probably be an impossibility, for it is supported vigorously by the thousands who are flattered by it. Nevertheless, it remains hollow and invalid, and a huge body of facts stands against it. Of late it was mouthed very affectingly by homilists at the bier of the deceased Valentino. It was, it appeared, a disgrace to humanity that Valentino got such vast rewards, and so many pious and laborious men such small ones. His daily income was fifty times that of a bishop, a hundred times that of a pedagogue, and perhaps a thousand times that of a poet. And what did he do to earn it? He postured absurdly in nonsensical movies. He filled hundreds of thousands of female morons with gaudy and often salacious dreams. He destroyed throughout America, and even throughout the world, the respect that should go to dull and industrious men, painfully earning livings for their families.

  With all due respect, bosh! Valentino was actually one of the most useful men who ever lived in the federal union, and deserved every cent he took in. Into the life of a sordid, unimaginative and machine-bound people he brought a breath of romance. Thousands of poor girls doomed to marry book-keepers, garage-keepers and Kiwanians got out of his pulchritude a precious and lasting thrill. He lifted their eyes above the carpet sweeper and the slop pail. He made them, for a brief space, gloriously, royally, and even a bit sinfully happy. What bishop has ever done more for them, or at a lower rate per capita? And what pedagogue? And what poet?

  The world has always rewarded its romance makers richly, and with sound reason. They are extremely valuable men. They take away the sting of life, and make it expansive and charming. They make the forlorn brigades of God’s images forget the miseries that issue out of hard work, mounting debts, disintegrating kidneys, and the fear of Hell. And their value, socially, obviously runs in direct proportion to the number of people they can reach and tickle. A Greenwich Village advanced poet, writing unintelligible Freudian strophes, is worth only the $9 a week that he gets, for his work brings joy to very few people. But an Edgar A. Guest, though his compositions may gag the judicious, earns every dollar of his millions, for when he lifts up his customers he lifts them up at wholesale, and the belch of satisfaction that follows is stupendous.

  Here I may seem to argue that the worse the artist the nobler the man. I actually argue nothing of the sort. I am speaking, not of imponderable rewards, but of rewards in cash. The genuine artist gets something that the Valentinos and Guests can never hope to get. It is the colossal inner glow that goes with difficult work competently done. Something else also comes to him: the respect and esteem of his peers. He gathers fame, and it tends to be lasting. He cherishes the rare and immensely satisfying certainty that he will be remembered after he has gone from these scenes—that he is definitely and permanently rescued from the depressing swarm of anonymous men. The Valentinos and Guests get no such reward. Guest is admired by Rotarians, and probably enjoys it, but he would enjoy it infinitely more if he were admired by men of taste. Poor Valentino was an even worse case. His customers, in the main, were idiots, and he was well aware of it. He would have willingly swapped all his money for an hour of the fame of Beethoven, for he was intelligent enough to see the adulation that surrounded him for what it was. But he was also intelligent enough to see that the fame of Beethoven was hopelessly beyond his reach, and so he raked in such rewards as actually came his way. It seems to me that he deserved them. He deserved them quite as much as any pedagogue in this glorious land deserves his $1,500 a year.

  My experience of this worst of possible worlds convinces me that very few men are ever paid less than they are worth. Many are paid more, especially in America, where a great deal more money rolls in every year than the people of the country can earn, but not many are paid less. The cases that pop up almost always turn out, on inspection, to be extremely dubious. Some time ago, for example, the medical journals were full of sad articles on the meager earnings of the ordinary run of doctors—the modest fellows who confine themselves to neighborhood practise, and spend their days looking at tongues, dosing colds, and digging shoe buttons out of babies’ ears and noses. But it was quickly apparent, as the discussion developed, that most of these worthies were getting, not less than they deserved, but a great deal more. The trouble with them was simply that they were incompete
nt at their trade. Most of them knew no more about modern medicine than so many chiropractors or ambulance drivers. Their practise constituted a swindle, and their customers, becoming aware of the fact, turned to specialists, i.e., to men better equipped to do what they were paid to do. These same specialists were rolling in money, for in medicine, as in all other professions, even the most modest competence is relatively rare, and the man who has it is thus heavily rewarded.

  The truth is that in the United States today men of all imaginable trades, including even that of poetry, are enormously well paid—provided only they have a reasonable skill at the thing they practise. The bellowing to the contrary comes from incompetents and frauds—doctors who are but little removed from Indian herb medicine men, lawyers who know no law, pedagogues who are jackasses, bootleggers who swindle their clients, authors with nothing to say, actors worse than clothing store dummies.

  XII. PLACES TO LIVE

  Totentanz

  From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 145–57

  I CAN think of no great city of this world (putting aside Rio de Janeiro, Sydney and San Francisco) that is set amid scenes of greater natural beauty than New York, by which I mean, of course, Manhattan. Recall Berlin on its dismal plain, Paris and London on their toy rivers, Madrid on its desert, Copenhagen on its swamp, Rome on its ancient sewer and its absurd little hills, and then glance at Manhattan on its narrow and rock-ribbed island, with deep rivers to either side and the wide bay before it. No wonder its early visitors, however much they denounced the Dutch, always paused to praise the scene! Before it grew up, indeed, New York must have been strangely beautiful. But it was the beauty of freshness and unsophistication—in brief, of youth—and now it is no more. The town today, I think, is quite the ugliest in the world—uglier, even, than Liverpool, Chicago or Berlin. If it were actually beautiful, as London, say, is beautiful, or Munich, or Charleston, or Florence, or even parts of Paris and Washington, then New Yorkers would not be so childishly appreciative of the few so-called beauty spots that it has—for example, Washington Square, Gramercy Park, Fifth avenue and Riverside drive. Washington Square, save for one short row of old houses on the North side, is actually very shabby and ugly—a blot rather than a beauty spot. The trees, year in and year out, have a mangy and sclerotic air; the grass is like stable litter; the tall tower on the South side is ungraceful and preposterous; the memorial arch is dirty and undignified; the whole place looks dingy, frowsy and forlorn. Compare it to Mt. Vernon Square in Baltimore: the difference is that between a charwoman and a grand lady. As for Gramercy Park, it is celebrated only because it is in New York; if it were in Washington or London it would not attract a glance. Fifth avenue, to me, seems to be showy rather than beautiful. What gives it its distinction is simply its spick and span appearance of wealth; it is the only New York street that ever looks well-fed and clean. Riverside drive lacks even so much; it is second-rate from end to end, and especially where it is gaudiest. What absurd and hideous houses, with their brummagem Frenchiness, their pathetic effort to look aristocratic! What bad landscaping! What grotesque monuments! From its heights the rich look down upon the foul scars of the Palisades, as the rich of Fifth avenue and Central Park West look down upon the anemic grass, bare rocks and blowing newspapers of Central Park. Alone among the great cities of the East, New York has never developed a domestic architecture of any charm, or, indeed, of any character at all. There are neighborhoods in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore and in many lesser cities that have all the dignity and beauty of London, but in New York the brownstone mania of the Nineteenth Century brought down the whole town to one level of depressing ugliness, and since brownstone has gone out there has been no development whatever of indigenous design, but only a naïve copying of models—the skyscraper from Chicago and the dwelling-house from Paris. Along Fifth avenue, from the Fifty-ninth street corner to the upper end of Central Park, there is not a single house that looks reposeful and habitable. Along Park avenue—but Park avenue, for all its flash of creamy brick, is surely one of the most hideous streets in all the world!

  But the life of the city, it must be confessed, is as interesting as its physical aspect is dull. It is, even more than London or Paris, the modern Babylon, and since 1914 it has entered upon a period of luxuriousness that far surpasses anything seen on earth since the fall of the Eastern Empire. During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year. All the colossal accumulated wealth of the United States, the greatest robber nation in history, tends to force itself at least once a year through the narrow neck of the Manhattan funnel. To that harsh island come all the thieves of the Republic with their loot—bankers from the fat lands of the Middle West, lumbermen from the Northwestern coasts, mine owners from the mountains, oil speculators from Texas and Oklahoma, cotton-mill sweaters from the South, steel magnates and manufacturers from the Black Country, blacklegs and exploiters without end—all laden with cash, all eager to spend it, all easy marks for the town rogues and panders. The result is a social organization that ought to be far more attractive to novelists than it is—a society founded upon the prodigious wealth of Monte Cristo and upon the tastes of sailors home from a long voyage. At no time and place in modern times has harlotry reached so delicate and yet so effusive a development; it becomes, in one form or another, one of the leading industries of the town. New York, indeed, is the heaven of every variety of man with something useless and expensive to sell. There come the merchants with their bales of Persian prayer-rugs, of silk pajamas, of yellow girls, of strange jugs and carboys, of hand-painted oil-paintings, of old books, of gim-cracks and tinsel from all the four corners of the world, and there they find customers waiting in swarms, their checkbooks open and ready. What town in Christendom has ever supported so many houses of entertainment, so many mimes and mountebanks, so many sharpers and coney-catchers, so many bawds and pimps, so many hat-holders and door-openers, so many miscellaneous servants to idleness and debauchery? The bootlegging industry takes on proportions that are almost unbelievable; there are thousands of New Yorkers, resident and transient, who pay more for alcohol every year than they pay for anything else save women. I have heard of a single party at which the guests drank 100 cases of champagne in an evening—100 cases at $100 a case—and it was, as entertainments go in New York today, a quiet and decorous affair. It is astonishing that no Zola has arisen to describe this engrossing and incomparable dance of death. Upton Sinclair once attempted it, in “The Metropolis,” but Sinclair, of course, was too indignant for the job. Moreover, the era he dealt with was mild and amateurish; today the pursuit of sensation has been brought to a far higher degree of perfection. One must go back to the oriental capitals of antiquity to find anything even remotely resembling it. Compared to the revels that go on in New York every night, the carnalities of the West End of Berlin are trivial and childish, and those of Paris and the Côte d’Azur take on the harmless aspect of a Sunday-school picnic.

  What will be the end of the carnival? If historical precedent counts for anything, it will go on to catastrophe. But what sort of catastrophe? I hesitate to venture upon a prophecy. Manhattan Island, with deep rivers all around it, seems an almost ideal scene for a great city revolution, but I doubt very much that there is any revolutionary spirit in its proletariat. Some mysterious enchantment holds its workers to their extraordinarily uncomfortable life; they apparently get a vague sort of delight out of the great spectacle that they are no part of. The New York workman patronizes fellow workmen from the provinces even more heavily than the Wall Street magnate patronizes country mortgage-sharks. He is excessively proud of his citizenship in the great metropolis, though all it brings him is an upper berth in a dog kennel. Riding along the elevated on the East Side and gaping into the windows of the so-called human habitations that stretch on either hand, I often wonder what process of reasoning impels, say, a bricklayer or a truckdriver to s
pend his days in such vile hutches. True enough, he is paid a few dollars more a week in New York than he would receive anywhere else, but he gets little more use out of them than an honest bank teller. In almost any other large American city he would have a much better house to live in, and better food; in the smaller towns his advantage would be very considerable. Moreover, his chance of lifting himself out of slavery to some measure of economic independence and autonomy would be greater anywhere else; if it is hard for the American workman everywhere to establish a business of his own, it is triply hard in New York, where rents are killingly high and so much capital is required to launch a business that only Jews can raise it. Nevertheless, the poor idiot hangs on to his coop, dazzled by the wealth and splendor on display all around him. His susceptibility to this lure makes me question his capacity for revolution. He is too stupid and poltroonish for it, and he has too much respect for money. It is this respect for money in the proletariat, in fact, that chiefly safeguards and buttresses capitalism in America. It is secure among us because Americans venerate it too much to attack it.