H.L. Mencken, when he’s not actively writing specific and earnest criticism or researching and writing for journalistic purposes, comes off to me as someone I fundamentally do not trust. I don’t think this is entirely his fault, but more so the faults of the people who constantly quote him or bring him up or extol his virtues. And to be fair, I am sure that in his day he was a constant and forceful voice against, well, mostly bullshit. But he also inspired a kind somewhat Left/Libertarian male officiousness that I aspired to be when I was younger and ran away sprinting away as I got older. It’s the worst tendencies of Stephen King’s sanctimonious streak that comes out on twitter sometimes, or bulk of the individvualized George Carlin quotes, and all of Keith Olberman. The kind of things that makes a certain amount of sense but are too reductive to do anybody any good. It’s not quite hokum, because it’s clever, but it’s well something.
This book is a kind of 45 theses on various topics…not unlike a collection of George Carlin brain droppings…but of important issues! and circa 1918.
Some Examples:
“ON LYING
Lying stands on a different plane from all other moral offenses, not because it is intrinsically more heinous or less heinous, but simply because it is the only one that may be accurately measured. Forgetting unwitting error, which has nothing to do with morals, a statement is either true or not true. This is a simple distinction and relatively easy to establish. But when one comes to other derelictions the thing grows more complicated. The line between stealing and not stealing is beautifully vague; whether or not one has crossed it is not determined by the objective act, but by such delicate things as motive and purpose. So again, with assault, sex offenses, and even murder; there may be surrounding circumstances which greatly condition the moral quality of the actual act. But lying is specific, exact, scientific. Its capacity for precise determination, indeed, makes its presence or non-presence the only accurate gauge of other immoral acts. Murder, for example, is nowhere regarded as immoral save it involve some repudiation of a social compact, of a tacit promise to refrain from it—in brief, some deceit, some perfidy, some lie. One may kill freely when the pact is formally broken, as in war. One may kill equally freely when it is broken by the victim, as in an assault by a highwayman. But one may not kill so long as it is not broken, and one may not break it to clear the way. Some form of lie is at the bottom of all other recognized crimes, from seduction to embezzlement. Curiously enough, this master immorality of them all is not prohibited by the Ten Commandments, nor is it penalized, in its pure form, by the code of any civilized nation. Only savages have laws against lying per se.”
“THE CURSE OF CIVILIZATION
A civilized man’s worst curse is social obligation. The most unpleasant act imaginable is to go to a dinner party. One could get far better food, taking one day with another, at Childs’, or even in a Pennsylvania Railroad dining-car; one could find far more amusing society in a bar-room or a bordello, or even at the Y. M. C. A. No hostess in Christendom ever arranged a dinner party of any pretensions without including at least one intensely disagreeable person—a vain and vapid girl, a hideous woman, a follower of baseball, a stock-broker, a veteran of some war or other, a gabbler of politics. And one is enough to do the business.”
“MORALIST AND ARTIST
I dredge up the following from an essay on George Bernard Shaw by Robert Blatchford, the English Socialist: “Shaw is something much better than a wit, much better than an artist, much better than a politician or a dramatist; he is a moralist, a teacher of ethics, austere, relentless, fiercely earnest.”
What could be more idiotic? Then Cotton Mather was a greater man than Johann Sebastian Bach. Then the average college critic of the arts, with his balderdash about inspiration and moral purpose, is greater than Georg Brandes or Saint-Beuve. Then Éugene Brieux, with his Y. M. C. A. platitudinizing, is greater than Molière, with his ethical agnosticism, his ironical determinism.
This childish respect for moralizing runs through the whole of contemporary criticism—at least in England and America. Blatchford differs from the professorial critics only in the detail that he can actually write. What he says about Shaw has been said, in heavy and suffocating words, by almost all of them. And yet nothing could be more untrue. The moralist, at his best, can never be anything save a sort of journalist. Moral values change too often to have any serious validity or interest; what is a virtue today is a sin tomorrow. But the man who creates a thing of beauty creates something that lasts.”
