At once the work of cleaning up the debris began. It took almost as long as erecting the stand. Every plank was seized by four brothers, each with three or four more to boss him. The trestles and zigzags took six or eight. Several generals emerged from the mass, planning the grand strategy of the removal. The truck was moved down the street six feet, and then moved back again. Orders came roaring from all points of the compass. Gaping small boys were knocked over. The sod was hoofed and gouged up for yards around. Two brothers leaped into the truck to receive the planks. One was knocked over and went sprawling. Finally the truck was loaded and rolled away, and a general went about shouting “Go to the hall!” Then the band ambled off, the sisters followed, the children dispersed, and the show was over.
I present the record as a small contribution to the literature of human imbecility. Seen in retrospect, the episode seems quite fantastic. Imagine setting up those slim trestles on a soft lawn, and then loading them with a couple of tons of women and children! The planks sagged from the first moment. The trestles wobbled and dug in. But not a man in that whole gang of saved and polished souls had wit enough to see what was bound to follow. With the energy of beavers and the devotion of holy martyrs they erected their crazy machine, loaded it with children and then stood by in amazement as it slid from under their noses. The facts belong to any psychologist who cares to anatomize them. As for me, I confess that I got a considerable pleasure out of the spectacle. It was harmless in its effects, and it was perfect in its essence.
Interlude Sentimentale
From the Smart Set, Sept., 1919, p. 42
Ah, those far-off, half-forgotten days, when there was yet enough alcohol in malt to make a vase of it romantic, and the girls were not afraid of shocking a man of my years, and I roamed the great world, sipping beauty like a bee.… I’ll never forget one flaming Spring morning at Versailles, perhaps between 10 A.M. and 10:15. Ed Moffett and I stood on the little bridge near the Petit Trianon watching the famous carp leap into the tiny stream below. “Those carp,” said Ed, “are happy. They never get sore feet hoofing through these wet woods. They are never thirsty. They have no religion. They don’t know that Marie Antoinette is dead. They have never heard of Socialism.”
To make conversation I disputed. “They can’t be wholly happy,” I argued. “They haven’t any vices.”
Ed considered the point a moment and then hauled out a large plug of Gravely’s Choice, the Corona-Corona of chewing tobaccos. “It is,” he said, “possible.” Then he broke off three inches of the plug and dropped it with great precision into the gaping mouth of the largest carp.
“Come,” said Ed. “Let us get away before he discovers how happy he is.”
Elegy in C Minor
From a hitherto unpublished manuscript
What has become of Brigham Young,
That mastodon of lust?
Alas, his withers they are wrung,
His gonads turned to dust.
And what’s the news of Honest Abe,
That paladin of truth?
Alas, but he was polished off
By Wendell Willkie Booth.
And can you tell of U. S. Grant,
Oh, have you any news?
Alas, he undermined his health
By licking up the booze.
Jeff Davis, what’s become of him?
Where, tell me, does he dwell?
Alas, I hear by radio
He’s forty foot in Hell.
And what’s become of R. E. Lee,
Who fought with General Grant?
Alas, what little’s left of him
Is food for worm and ant.
And Calvin Coolidge, wonder man,
How is he now, and where?
Alas, he’s laid away for keeps
In Yahweh’s frigidaire.
And Harding, have you heard of him?
Alas, he is no more;
The Nazis slit his weazand on
The lone Pacific shore.
And Herbert Hoover, LL.D.,
What news, if any, pray?
Alas, he waits the coming of
A Brighter, Better Day.
And what, my friends, of old John D.—
Has he been seen of late?
Alas, he’s wearing out his fists
Upon the Pearly Gate.
And John the Baptist—goodness me!
Don’t ask me where he’s at;
The Scriptures say that he struck out
His first time at the bat.
Of Moses I can tell you naught
And know no one who can;
He vanished when he changed his name
To Franklin D. Moran.
And what of Noah? Where could one
Expect to find his clay?
Alas, the books say only that
He’s laid away to stay.
And what of Mary Magdalen?
I’d tell you if I could,
But all that I can gather is,
She went to Hollywood.
And Adam, father of us all?
Alas, the myst’ry mounts;
The one thing sure is that he was
Still dead at last accounts.
The Jocose Gods
From DAMN!: A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, p. 37
What humor could be more cruel than that of life itself? Franz Schubert, on his deathbed, read the complete works of J. Fenimore Cooper. John Millington Synge wrote “Riders to the Sea” on a second-hand typewriter, and wore a celluloid collar. Richard Wagner made a living, during four years, arranging Italian opera arias for the cornet. Herbert Spencer sang bass in a barber-shop quartette and was in love with George Eliot. One of the greatest soldiers in Hungarian history was named Hunjadi Janos.
XXVIII. NIETZSCHE
The Bugaboo
From the Smart Set, Jan., 1920, pp. 55–56
MUCH OF the current blabber against the late Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is grounded upon the doctrine that his capacity for consecutive thought was clearly limited. In support of the doctrine his critics cite the fact that most of his books are no more than strings of apothegms, with the subject changing on every second page. All this, it must be obvious, is fundamentally nonsensical. What deceives the professors is the traditional garrulity and prolixity of philosophers. Because the average philosophical writer, when he essays to expose his ideas, makes such copious drafts upon the parts of speech that the dictionary is almost emptied, these defective observers jump to the conclusion that his intrinsic notions are of corresponding elaborateness. This is not true. I have read Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibnitz, Fichte, Locke, Schleiermacher, James and Bergson, not to mention the Greeks and the Romans; the more I read, the more I am convinced that it is not true.
What makes philosophy hard to read is not the complexity of the ideas set forth, but the complexity of the language in which they are concealed. The typical philosopher, having, say, four new notions, drowns them in a sea of words—all borrowed from other philosophers. One must wade through endless chapters of old stuff to get at the minute kernels of the new stuff.… This process Nietzsche avoided. He always assumed that his readers knew the books, and that it was thus unnecessary to rewrite them. Having an idea that seemed to him to be novel and original, he stated it in as few words as possible, and then shut down. Sometimes he got it into a hundred words; sometimes it took a thousand. But he never wrote a word too many; he never pumped up an idea to make it appear bigger than it actually was.… The professors are not used to that sort of writing. Nietzsche employed too few words for them—and he had too many ideas.
Nietzsche on Christianity
From my translation of The ANTICHRIST, 1920. This translation, like the first edition of The American Language, was undertaken as a recreation during World War I, when the prevailing spy-hunt made it impossible to do any rational writing on public questions. There had been two previous translations, but it seemed to me that they were somewhat stiff. What I tried to do was get into m
ine some reflection of the extraordinary dramatic quality and verbal coruscation of the original. It came out with the approbation of Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English edition of Nietzsche and owner of the rights thereto
What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity.…
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (—man is an end—): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;—and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man—the Christian.…
Christianity has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts—the strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.…
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity” would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. This depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of décadence—pity persuades to extinction.… Of course, one doesn’t say “extinction,” one says “the other world,” or “God,” or “the true life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.… This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life.… Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here—all this is our business, all this is our sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers.
The poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as “idealists”—among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion.… The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand (—and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent contempt against “understanding,” “the senses,” “honor,” “good living,” “science”; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which “the soul” soars as a pure thing-in-itself—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices.… The pure soul is a pure lie.… So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.…
The Christian concept of a god—the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the “here and now,” and for every lie about the “beyond”! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!…
When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future, is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the “meaning” of life.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,—sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon the superbia of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of “faith” must be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start.… “Faith” means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his instinct demands that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. “Whatever makes for illness is good; whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is evil”: so argues the believer.
The whole labor of the ancient world gone for naught. To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?—All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably—that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road—the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready—and the most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves—for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies—that is to say
, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge—all these things were already there, and had been there for 2,000 years! All gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory!
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,—an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values.… This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there.… I see before me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:—it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter—Caesar Borgia as pope! … Am I understood?… Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today—: by it Christianity would have been swept away!
Second Mencken Chrestomathy Page 54