 Damn, a book of Calumny, part one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Damn, a book of Calumny by H. L. Menken. One. Pater Patrie. If George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would be for the whole Kamara of uplifters, forward-lookers, and professional patriots. He was the Rockefeller of his time, the richest man in the United States, a promoter of stock companies, a land grabber, an exploiter of mines, and timber. He was a bitter opponent of foreign alliances and denounced their evils in harsh specific terms. He had a liking for all forthright and pugnacious men and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters, and all other such obscurantists. He was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory adults and tried to save the Republic from them. He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors. Inhabiting these states today, George would be ineligible for any office of honor or profit. The Senate would never dare confirm him. The President would not think of nominating him. He would be on trial in all the yellow journals for belonging to the invisible government, the hellhounds of plutocracy, the money power, the interests. The Sherman Act would have him in its toils. He would be under indictment by every grand jury south of Potomac. The triumphant prohibitionists of his native state would be denouncing him. He had a still at Mount Vernon as a debaucher of youth, a recruiting officer for insane asylums, a poisoner of the home. The suffragettes would be on his trail. Was sentinels posted all along the Acontink Road? The initiators and referenders would be bawling for his blood. The young college men of the nation and the New Republic would be lecturing him weekly. He would be used to scare children in Kansas and Arkansas. The Chautauquas would shiver whenever his name was mentioned. And what a chance there would be for that ambitious young district attorney who thought to shadow him on his peregrinations and grab him under the Man Act. 2. The reward of the artist. A man labors in fumes for a whole year to write a symphony in G Minor. He puts enormous diligence into it and much talent and maybe no little downright genius. It draws his blood and rings his soul. He dies in it that he may live again. Nevertheless, its final value in the open market of the world is a great deal less than that of a fur overcoat. Half a Rolls-Royce automobile or a handful of authentic hair from the whiskers of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 3. The heroic considered. For humility and poverty in themselves, the world has little liking and less respect. In the folklore of all races, despite the sentimentalization of a basement for dramatic effect, it is always power and grandeur that count in the end. The whole point of the story of Cinderella, the most widely and constantly charming of all stories, is that the fairy prince lifts Cinderella above her cruel sisters and stepmother and so enables her to lord it over them. The same idea underlies practically all other folk stories. The essence of each of them is to be found in the ultimate triumph and exaltation of its protagonist. And of the real men and women of history, the most venerated and envied are those whose early humiliations were but preludes to terminal glories. For example, Lincoln, Whittington, Franklin, Columbus, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, Catherine, Mary of Magdala, Moses. Even the man of sorrows, cradled in a manger and done to death between two thieves, is seen, as we part from him at last, in a situation of stupendous magnificence with infinite power in his hand. Even the Beatitudes, in the midst of their eloquent counseling of renunciation, give an unimaginable splendor as its reward. The meek shall inherit, what? the whole earth. And the poor in spirit, they shall sit upon the right hand of God. Four. The burden of humor. What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic? Has humanity found by experience, that the man who sees the fun of life is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not. No man had more of the comic spirit in him than William Shakespeare. And yet, his serious reflections, by the sheer force of their sublime obviousness, have pushed their way into the race's arsenal of immortal platitudes. So too, with Aesop, and with Balzac, and with Dickens to come down the scale. All of these men were fundamentally humorists, and yet all of them achieved what the race has come to accept, as a penetrating sagacity. Contrary wise, many a haloed pundit has had his occasional guffaw. Lincoln, had there been no civil war, might have survived in history, chiefly, as the father of the American smuddy story. The only original art form that America has yet contributed to literature. Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duelist of his age, might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Molière. His surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sargonic bullfiddling of the Cherzo. No, there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and nonsense, humor and respectability, despite the skittish tendency to assume that there is. But why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact of life lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness? None other, I am convinced, than the fact that the average man is far too stupid to make a joke. He may see a joke and love a joke, particularly when it floors and flabbergasts some person he dislikes. But the only way he can himself take part in the priming and pointing of a new one is by acting as its target, in brief. His personal contact with humor tends to fill him with an accumulated sense of disadvantage, of pricked complacency, of sudden and crushing defeat. And so, by an easy psychological process, he has led into the idea that the thing itself is incompatible with true dignity of character and intellect. Hence, his deep suspicion of jokers however adept their thrust. What a damned fool, this same half-pitying tribute he pays to wit and but alike. He cannot separate the virtuoso of comedy from his general concept of comedy itself. And that concept is inextricably mingled with memories of foul ambuscades and mortifying hurts. And so, it is not often that he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condone frivolity in a sage, five, the saving grace. Let us not burn the universities, yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse. Suppose Oxford had snared and disemboweled Shakespeare. Suppose Harvard had set its stamp upon Mark Twain. Six. Moral indignation. The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the Republic against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming. These astounding Methodist jahads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that the law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates. The poor numbskull, who is so horribly harrowed by purits and pulpit thumpers that he can't go to a ballgame on Sunday afternoon without dreaming of hell and the devil all Sunday night, is naturally envious of the fellow who can, and, being envious of him, he hates him and is eager to destroy his offensive happiness. The farmer, who works eighteen hours a day and never gets a day off, is envious of his farmhand, who goes to the crossroads and barrels up on Saturday afternoon. Hence the virulence of prohibition among the peasantry. The hard-working householder, who on some bitter evening glances over the Saturday evening post for a square, an honest look at his wife, is envious of those gaudy drummers who go gallivanting about the country with scarlet girls. Hence the man-act. If these deviltries were equally open to all men, and all men were equally capable of appreciating them, their unpopularity would tend to wither. I often think, indeed, that the prohibitionist tub-thumpers make a tactical mistake in dwelling too much upon the evils and horrors of alcohol, and not enough upon its delights. A few enlarged photographs of first-class barrooms showing the rows of well-fed, well-dressed babooly happily moored to the brass rails, their noses and fragrant mints and hops, and their hands reaching out for free rations of olives, pretzels, cloves, pumpernickel, bismarck herring, anchovies, swertenmagen, weaners, smithfield ham, and dill pickles. Such a gallery of contentment would probably do far more execution among the dismal shudra than all the current portraits of drunkard's livers. To vote for prohibition in the face of the liver-portraits means to vote for the good of the other fellow, for even the oldest, Bibulomaniac, always thinks that he himself will escape. This is an act of altruism almost impossible to the mob man, whose selfishness is but little corrupted by the imagination that shows itself in his betters. His most austere renunciations represent no more than a matching of the joys of indulgence against the pains of hell. Religion to him is little more than synthesized fear. I venture that many a vote for prohibition comes from gentlemen who look longingly through swinging doors and pass on. In propitiation of Satan and their alert consorts, the lake of brimstone and the corrective broomstick. 7. Stable Names Why doesn't some patient drudge of a privat dozen compile a dictionary of the stable names of the great? All showdogs and race-horses, as everyone knows, have stable names. On the list of entries, a fast mare may appear as Zarina Ogla Federovna, but in the stable she is not that at all, nor even Zarina or Olga, but maybe Lil or Jenny. And a prize bulldog, champion Zoraster or Charlemagne XI on the bench, may be plain Jack or Ponto Infamy. So is celebrities of the genus Homo. Huxley's official style and appellation was the right honorable Thomas Henry Huxley, P-C-M-D-P-H-D-L-D-C-L-D-S-C-F-R-S, and his biographer tells us that he delighted in its rolling grandeur. But to his wife, he was always how? Shakespeare, to his fellows of his bank side, was Will, and perhaps Willie to Anne Hathaway. The Kaiser is another Willie. The Lades are so addressed him in their famous exchange of telegrams. The Tsar himself was Nicky in those days, and no doubt remains Nicky to his intimates today. Edgar Allen Poe was always Eddie to his wife, and Mark Twain was always youth to his. P.T. Barnum's stable name was Taylor, his middle name. Charles Lambs was Guy, Nietzsche's was Fritz, Whistler's was Jimmy, the late King Edwards was Bertie, Grover Cleveland's was Steve, Jay Pierpont Morgan's was Jack, Dr. Wilson's is Tom. Some given names are surrounded by a whole flotilla of stable names. Henry, for example, is softened variously into Harry, Hen, Hank, Hal, Henry, Henry, Henri, and Heiney. Which did Anne Bolin use when she cooed into the suspicious ear of Henry they? To which did Henric Ibsen answer at the domestic hearth? It is difficult to imagine his wife calling him Henric. The name is harsh, clumsy, razor-edged. But did she make it hen or rick or neither? What was Bismarck to the first teen, and to the mother he so vastly feared? Otkin? Somehow it seems impossible. What was Grant to his wife, surely not Ulysses? And Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Rutherford B. Hayes? Was Robert Browning ever Bob? Was John Wesley ever Jack? Was Emanuel Swendenborg ever Manny? Was Tadayusk Koskvisko ever Teddy? A fair field of inquiring vites. Let some laborious assistant professor explore and chart it. There will be more of human nature in his report than in all the novels ever written. Eight. The Jews. The Jews, like the Americans, labor under a philosophical dualism. And in both cases, it is a theological heritage. On the one hand, there is the idealism that is lovely and uplifting and will get a man into heaven. And on the other hand, there is the realism that works. The fact that the Jews cling to both, thus running as it were, upon two tracks, is what makes them so puzzling now and then to the golem. In one aspect, they stand for the most savage practicality. In another aspect, they are dreamers of an almost fabulous other worldliness. My own belief is that the essential Jew is the idealist. That his occasional flashing of hyena teeth is no more than a necessary concession to the harsh demands of the struggle for existence. Perhaps in many cases, it is due to an actual corruption of blood. The Jews come from the Levant, and their women were exposed for many centuries to the admiration of Greek, Arab, and Armenian. The shark that a Jew can be at his worst is simply a Greek or Armenian at his best. As a statement of post-mortem and superterrestrial fact, the religion that the Jews have foisted upon the world seems to me to be as vast a curse as the influenza that we inherit from the Tartars, or the democratic fallacies set afloat by the French Revolution. The one thing that can be said in favor of it is that it is not true, and yet we suffer from it almost as much as if it were true, but with it, encasing it and preserving it, there has come something that is positively valuable, something indeed that is beyond all price, and that is Jewish poetry. To compare it to the poetry of any other race is wholly impossible. It stands completely above all the rest. It is as far beyond the next best as German music is beyond French music, or French painting beyond English painting, or the English drama beyond the Italian drama. There are single chapters in the Old Testament that are worth all the poetry ever written in the New World and nine-tenths of that written in the Old. The Jews of those ancient days had imagination. They had dignity. They had ears for sweet sound. They had above all the faculty of grandeur. The stupendous music that issued from them has swept their barbaric deminology along with it, setting it not the collective intelligence of the human species. They embalmed their idiotic taboos and fetishes and undying strains, and so gave them some measure of the same immortality. A race of lawgivers, Bosch. Leviticus is as archaic as the code of Manu, and the Decalogue is a fossil. A race of seers, Bosch again. The God they saw survives only as a bogeyman, a theory, in uneasy and vexatious ghost. A race of traitors and sharpers, Bosch a third time. The Jews are as poor as the Spaniards. But a race of poets, my lords, a race of poets. It is a vision of beauty that has ever haunted them, and it has been their destiny to transmit that vision, enfeebled perhaps, but still distinct, to other and lesser peoples, that life might be made softer for the sons of men, and the goodness of the Lord God, whoever he may be, might not be forgotten. Nine. The Comstockian premise. It is argued against certain books, by virtuosity of moral alarm, that they depict vice as attractive. This recalls the king who hanged a judge for deciding that an archbishop was a mammal. Ten. Labial infamy. After five years of search, I have been able to discover but one book in English upon the art of kissing. And that is a very feeble treatise by a savant of York, Pennsylvania, Dr. R. McCormick Sturgeon. There may be others, but I have been quite unable to find them. Kissing, for all one hears of it, has not attracted the scientists and literati. One compares its meager literature with the endless books upon the other phenomena of love, especially divorce and obstetrics. Even Dr. Sturgeon, pioneering bravely, is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of the thing he vivisects. And so his book is no more than a compendium of mush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorous gavel about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such like imaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that the lungs are strongly expanded during the act? My own casual observation inclines me to hold that the opposite is true, that the lungs are actually collapsed in a pseudo-asmatic spasm. Again, what is the ground for arguing that the lips are full ripe and red? The real effect of the emotions that accompany kissing is to empty the superficial capillaries and so produce a lead-in pallor. As for such salient symptoms as the temperature, the pulse and the rate of respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clues Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate treatise upon kissing. Her books upon the family and fear and conventionality indicate her possession of the right sort of learning. Even better would be a work by Hablock Ellis, say, in three or four volumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteries of sex, and his collection of materials is unsurpassed in the world. Surely there must be an enormous mass of constructive stuff about kissing in his card indexes, letter files, book presses, and archives. Just why the kiss as we know it should have attained to its present popularity in Christendom is probably one of the things past finding out. The Japanese, a very affectionate and sentimental people, do not practice kissing in any form. They regard the act, in fact, with an aversion matching our own aversion to the rubbing of noses. Nor is it in vogue among the Muslims, nor among the Chinese who countens it only as between mother and child. Even in parts of Christendom, it is girt about by rigid taboos, so that its practice tends to be restricted to a few occasions. Two Frenchmen or Italians when they meet kiss each other on both cheeks. One used to see indeed many pictures of General Joffrey thus busing the heroes of Verdun. There even appeared in print a story to the effect that one of them objected to the scratching of his mustache. But imagine two Englishmen kissing or two Germans. As well imagine the former kissing the latter. Such a display of affection is simply impossible to man of northern blood. They would die with shame if caught at it. The Englishman like the American never kisses if he can help it. He even regards it as bad form to kiss his wife in a railway station or in fact anywhere in sight of a third party. The Latin has no such compunctions. He leaps to the business regardless of place or time. His sole concern is with the lady. Once in driving from Nice to Monte Carlo along the lower Cornish road I passed a hundred or so open taxi cabs containing man and woman and fully 75% of the men had their arms around their companions and were kissing them. These were not peasants remember but well-to-do persons in England. Such a scene would have caused a great scandal. In most American states the police would have charged the offenders with drawn revolvers. The charm of kissing is one of the things I have always wondered at. I do not pretend of course that I have never done it. Mere politeness forces one to it. There are women who sulk and grow bellicose unless one at least makes the motions of kissing them. But what I mean is that I have never found the act a tenth part as agreeable as poets the authors of musical comedy librettos and on the contrary side chaperones and the gendarmerie make it out. The physical sensation far from being pleasant is intensely uncomfortable a suspension of respiration indeed quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation. And the posture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips is unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically a man kisses a woman perpendicularly with their eyes those windows of the soul synchronizing exactly. But actually on account of the incompressibility of the nasal cartelages he has to incline either his or her head to an angle of at least 60 degrees and the result is that his right eye gazes insanely at this space between her eyebrows while his left eye is fixed upon some vague spot behind her. An instantaneous photograph of such a maneuver taken at the moment of incidents would probably turn the stomach of even the most romantic man and force him in sheer self-respect to renounce kissing as he has renounced leapfrog and walking on stilts. Only a woman for women are quite devoid of aesthetic feeling could survive so damning a picture but the most embarrassing moment in kissing does not come during the actual kiss for at that time the sensation of suffocation drives out all purely psychical feelings but immediately afterward. What is one to say to the woman then? The occasion obviously demands some sort of remark one has just received in theory a great boon the silence begins to make itself felt there stands the fair one obviously waiting is one to thank her certainly that would be too transparent a piece of hypocrisy to flaccid a banality is one to tell her that one loves her obviously there is danger in such assurances and decide one usually doesn't and a lie is a lie or is one to descend to chatty common places the weather literature politics the war the practical impossibility of solving the problem leads almost inevitably to a blunder far worse than any merely verbal one one kisses her again and then again and so on and so on the ultimate result is satiety repugnance disgust even the girl herself gets enough and of part one part two of damn a book of Calamity this liver box recording is in the public domain damn a book of Calamity by H. L. Lincoln part two eleven a true aesthetic Herbert Spencer's objection to swearing of which so much has been made by moralists was not an objection to its sinfulness but an objection to its charm in brief he feared comfort, satisfaction, joy the boarding houses in which he dragged out his grey years were as bare and cheerless as so many piano boxes he avoided all the little vices and dissipations which make human existence bearable good eating good drinking dancing tobacco poker poetry the theater personal adornment flandering adultery he was insanely suspicious of everything that threatened to interfere with his work even when that work halted him by the sheer agony of its monotony and it became necessary for him to find recreation he sought out some recreation that was as unattractive as possible in the hope that it would quickly drive him back to work again having to choose between methods of locomotion on his holidays he chose going afoot the most laborious and least satisfying available brought to bay by his human need for a woman he directed his fancy toward George Elliot probably the most unappetizing woman of his race and time drawn irresistibly to music he avoided the fifth symphony and Tristan Unisled and joined the crowd of old maids singing part songs around a cottage piano John Tyndall saw clearly the effect of all this and protested against it saying he'd be a much nicer fellow if he had a good swear now and then that is if he let go now and then if he yielded to his healthy human instincts now and then if he went on some sort of debauch now and then but what Tyndall overlooked was the fact that the meagerness of his recreations was the very element that attracted Spencer to them obsessed by fear and it turned out to be well grounded that he would not live long enough to complete his work he regarded all joy as a temptation a corruption, a sin of scarlet he was a true aesthetic he could sacrifice all things of the present for one thing of the future all things real for one thing ideal 12. 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 such delicate things is 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 a moral save it involves 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 path 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 of morality at them all is not prohibited by the Ten Commandments nor is it penalized in its pure form by the code with any civilized nation only savages have laws against lying, per se 13. History it is the misfortune of humanity that its history is chiefly written by third-rate men the first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record and philosophize his impulse is to act life to him is an adventure not a syllogism or an autopsy thus the writing of history is left to college professors moralists, theorists, dunderheads few historians, great or small have shown any capacity for the affairs they presumed to describe and interpret Gibbon was an inglorious failure as a member of parliament Vucitides made such a mess of his military or rather naval command that he was exiled from Athens for 20 years and finally assassinated Flavius Josephus, serving as governor of Galilee lost the whole province to the Romans and had to flee for his life Momsen, elected to the Prussian land tag, flirted with the socialist how much better we would understand the habits and nature of man if there were more historians like Julius Caesar or even like Niccolò Machiavelli remembering the sharp and devastating character of their rough notes think what marvelous histories Bismarck, Washington and Frederick the Great might have written such men are privy to the facts the usual historians have to depend on deductions, rumors, guesses again, such men know how to tell the truth, however unpleasant they are wholly free of that purile moral obsession which marks the professor but they so seldom tell it well, perhaps some of them have and their penalty is that they are damned and forgotten 14. 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 child's 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 YMCA 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 stockbroker, a veteran of some war or other, a gaveler of politics and one is enough to do the business 15. Eugenics the error of the eugenicists lies in the assumption that a physically healthy man is the best fitted to survive this is true of rats and the pedicule but not of the higher animals, for example horses, dogs, and men in these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities chiefly of the spirit imagine estimating philosophers by their chest expansions their blood pressures, their Wasserman reactions the so-called social diseases over which eugenicists raise such a father surely not the worst curses that mankind has to bear some of the greatest men in history have had them whole nations have had them and survived the truth about them is that save in relatively rare cases they do very little damage the horror in which they are held is chiefly a moral horror and its roots lie in the assumption that they cannot be contracted without sin nothing could be more false many great moralists have suffered from them the gods are always up to such sardonic waggeries moreover, only one of them is actually inheritable and that one is transmitted relatively seldom but among psychic characters one finds that practically all are inheritable for example, stupidity, fragility, avarice, peck-sniffery lack of imagination, hatred of beauty, meanness, poultrunery petty brutality, smallness of soul I here present, of course, the Puritan complex there flashes up the image of the good man that libel on God and the devil consider him well if you had to choose a sire for a first-rate son would you choose a consumptive Jew with the fires of eternity in his eyes or an Iowa right thinker with his hold full of bibles and breakfast food? 16. The Jaco's Gods what humor could be wilder than that of life itself? Franz Schubert on his deathbed read the complete works of J. Fenimore Cooper John Millington Singe wrote Writers to the Sea on a second-hand $40 typewriter and wore a celluloid collar Richard Wagner made a living during four lean years arranging Italian opera arias for the cornet Herbert Spencer sang bass in a barbershop quartet and was in love with George Elliott William Shakespeare was a social pusher and bought him a bogus coat of arms Martin Luther suffered from the Jim Jams one of the greatest soldiers in Hungarian history was named Hunyadi Janus 17. War superficially war seems an ordinantly cruel and wasteful and yet it must be plain on reflection that the natural evolutionary process is quite as cruel and even more wasteful man's chief efforts in times of peace are devoted to making that process less violent and sanguinary civilization indeed may be defined as a constructive criticism of nature and Huxley even called it a conspiracy against nature man tries to remedy what must inevitably seem the mistakes and to check what must inevitably seem the wanton cruelty of the creator in war man abandons these efforts and so becomes Morjovian the Greeks never represented the inhabitants of Olympus as suckering and protecting one another but always is fighting and attempting to destroy one another no form of death inflicted by war is one half so cruel as certain forms of death that are seen in hospitals every day 18. 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? than Cotton Mather was a greater man than Johann Sebastian Bach than the average college critic of the arts with his balder dash about inspiration and moral purpose is greater than George Brands or Saint Bouff than Eugene Brayou with his YMCA platitudinizing is greater than Mollier 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 professional 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 19. Actors in France they call an actor a matouvou which anglicized means hey 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 so-called art of mime by the editor of a magazine devoted to the stage the learned author evades plumbing the psychological springs of this astounding and almost invariable vanity this endless bumptiousness of the kebatan 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 bitten him to 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 number seven road company the two are alike charged to the limit one more ohm or molecule and they would burst actors begin where militia kernels fifth avenue rectors and shataka orators leave off the most modest of them barring perhaps a few unearthly traders to the craft matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girl on a slow ship in their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challenged only by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors I have spoken of the danger they run of bursting in the case of tenors it must sometimes actually happen even the least of them swells visibly as he sings and permanently as he grows older but why are actors in general such blatant and obnoxious asses such errant postures and windbags why is it as surprising to find an unassuming and likeable 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 intelligent alert ingenuous ambitious young fellow is he the young 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 bow the human clothes horse the nimble squire of dames the use of more active mind emerging from adolescence turned to business and the professions the men that they admire and seek to follow are men of genuine distinction men who have actually done difficult and valuable things men who have fought good if often dishonest fights and are respected and envied by other men the stage-struck youth is of a softer and more shallow sort he seeks not a chance to test his metal 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 poser a pop and j a pretty one I thus beg the question but explain the actor he is this silly youngster grown older but otherwise unchanged an initiate of a profession requiring little more information culture or capacity for ratios in nation than that of the lady of joy and surrounded in his workshop by men who are as stupid and vain and as empty as he himself will be in the years to come he suffers an arrest of development and little intelligence that may happen to be in him gets no chance to show itself the result in its usual manifestation is the average bad actor a man with a cerebrum of a floor walker and the vanity of a fashionable clergyman the result in its highest and holiest form is the actor-manager with his retinue of press agents, parasites, and worshipping wenches perhaps the most preposterous and awe-inspiring donkey that civilization has yet produced to look for sense in a fellow of such equipment and such a history would be like looking for serviettes in a sailor's boarding house by the same token the relatively greater intelligence of actresses is explained they are at their worst, quite as bad as the generality of actors there are she-stars who are all temperament and balder-dash intellectually speaking, beggars on horseback servant girls well washed but no one who knows anything about the stage need to be told that it can show a great many more quick-minded and self-respecting women than intelligent men and why? simply because its women are recruited in the main from a class much above that which furnishes its men it is after all not a natural for a woman of considerable intelligence to aspire to the stage it offers her indeed one of the most tempting careers that is open to her she cannot hope to succeed in business and in the other professions she is an unwelcome and much scoffed at intruder but on the boards she can meet men on an equal footing it is therefore no wonder that women of a relatively superior class often take to the business once they embrace it their superiority to their male colleagues is quickly manifest all movements against puerility and imbecility in the drama have originated not with actors but with actresses that is, in so far as they have originated among stage-folks at all the Ibsen pioneers were such women as Helena Mojeska, Agnes Sorma and Janet Ochurch the men all hung back Ibsen it would appear of the superior alertness and took shrewd advantage of it at all events his most tempting acting parts are feminine ones the girls of the stage demonstrate this tendency against great difficulties they have to carry a heavy handicap in the enormous number of women who seek the footlights merely to advertise their real profession but despite all this anyone who has the slightest acquaintance and hope will testify that taking one with another the women have vastly more brains than the men and are appreciably less vain and idiotic relatively few actresses of any rank marry actors they find close communion with the strutting brethren psychologically impossible stockbrokers, dramatists and even theatrical managers are greatly to be preferred twenty Gustav Le Bon and his school in their discussions of the psychology of crowds have put forward the doctrine that the individual man cheek by jowl with the multitude drops down an intellectual peg or two and so tends to show the mental and emotional reactions of his inferiors it is thus that they explain the well-known violence and imbecility of crowds the crowd, as a crowd performs acts that many of its members as individuals would never be guilty of its average intelligence is very low it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic almost simian crowds properly worked up by skillful demagogues are ready to believe anything and to do anything Le Bon, I dare say is partly right but also partly wrong his theory is probably too flattering to the average numbskull he accounts for the extravagance of crowds and the assumption that the numbskull along with the superior man is knocked out of his wits by suggestion that he too does things in association that he would never think of doing singly the fact may be accepted but the reasoning raises a doubt the numbskull runs amok in a crowd not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely in other words the numbskull is vicious but a paltrune he refrains from all attempts at lynching acapella not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch but because it takes the protection of a crowd to make him brave enough to try it what happens when a crowd cuts loose is not quite what Le Bon and his followers describe the few superior men in it are not straight way reduced to the level of the underlying stoneheads on the contrary they usually keep their heads and often make efforts to combat the crowd action but the stoneheads are too many for them the fence is torn down or the blackamore is lynched and why? not because the stoneheads normally virtuous are suddenly criminally insane nay but because they are suddenly conscious of the power lying in their numbers because they suddenly realize that their natural viciousness and insanity may be safely permitted to function in other words the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently resident in the majority of its members in all those members that is who are naturally ignorant and vicious perhaps 95% all studies of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this viciousness they are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower orders of men are angels this is nonsense the lower orders of men are incurable rascals either individually or collectively decency, self-restraint the sense of justice, courage these virtues belong only to a small minority of men this minority never runs amok its most distinguishing character in truth is its resistance to all running amok the third rate man he may wear the false whiskers of a first rate man may always be detected by his inability to keep his head in the face of an appeal to his emotions a whoop strips off his disguise end of section 2 part 3 of Damn, a book of Calumne this liver box recording is in the public domain Damn, a book of Calumne by H. L. McGinn part 3 21 an American philosopher as for William Jennings Bryant of whom so much pithful pro and con has been written the whole of his political philosophy may be reduced to two propositions neither of which is true the first is the proposition that the common people are wise and honest and the second is the proposition that all persons who refuse to believe it are scoundrels take away the two and all that would remain of Jennings would be a somewhat greasy bald headed man with his mouth open 22 clubs 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 that war and are still too sore to show any new enterprise and B those so lacking in charm that no woman will pay any attention to them is it any wonder that the men one thus encounters in clubs are stupid and miserable creatures and that they find their pleasure in such banal sports as playing cards drinking high balls, shooting pool and reading the barbershop weeklies the day a man's mistress is married one always finds him at his club 23 Podellus adernum despite the common belief of women to the contrary fully 95% of all married men at least in America are faithful to their wives this however is not due to virtue but chiefly to lack of courage it takes more initiative and daring to start up an extra legal affair than most men are capable of they look and they make plans but that is as far as they get another salient cause of cannubial rectitude is lack of means a mistress costs a great deal more than a wife in the open market of the world she can get more it is only the rare man who can conceal enough of his income from his wife to pay for a morganatic affair and most of the men clever enough to do this are too clever to be intrigued I have said that 95% of married men are faithful I believe the real proportion is near 99% what women mistake for infidelity is usually no more than vanity every man likes to be regarded as a devil of a fellow and particularly by his wife on the one hand it diverts her attention from his more genuine shortcomings and on the other hand it increases her respect for him moreover it gives her a chance to win the sympathy of other women and so satisfies that craving for martyrdom which is perhaps women's strongest characteristic a woman who never has any chance to suspect her husband feels cheated and humiliated she is in the position of those patriots who are induced to enlist for a war by pictures of cavalry charges and then find themselves told off to wash the general's underwear 24. A Theological Mystery the moral order of the world runs aground on hay fever of what use is it, why was it invented? cancer and hydrophobia at least may be defended on the ground that they kill killing may have some benign purpose some esoteric significance, some comic use but hay fever never kills, it merely tortures no man ever died of it is the torture then an end in itself? does it break the pride of strutting snorting man and turn his heart to the things of the spirit? nonsense a man with hay fever is a natural criminal he curses the gods and defies them to kill him he even curses the devil is it's use then to prepare him for happiness to come for the vast ease and comfort of convalescence? nonsense again the one thing he is sure of the one thing he never forgets for a moment is that it will come back again next year 25. The Test of Truth the final test of truth is ridicule very few religious dogmas have ever faced it and survived Huxley laughed the devils out of the gathering swine dowy's whiskers broke the back of dowyism not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to compromise and surrender not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation but the razor edge of ridicule is turned down by the tough hide of truth how loudly the barber surgeons laughed at Harvey and how vainly what clown ever brought down the house like Galileo or Columbus or Jenner or Lincoln or Darwin they are laughing at Nietzsche yet 26. Literary and Decenties the low graceless humor of names on my shelf of poetry arranged by the alphabet Coleridge and J. Gordon Colgler are next-door neighbors Mrs. Hemons is beside Lawrence Hope Walt Whitman rubs elbows with Ella Wheeler Wilcox Robert Browning with Richard Burton Rosetti with Cale Young Rice Shelley with Clinton Scholar Wordsworth with Georgie Woodbury John Keats with Herbert Kaufman Ibsen on the shelf of dramatists is between Victor Hugo and Jerome K. Jerome Suderman follows Harriet Beecher Stowe Madderlink, Shoulders Percy McKay Shakespeare is between Sardo and Shaw Euripides and Clyde Fitch Upton Sinclair and Sophocles Escalus and F. Anstay Denunzio and Richard Harding Davis Augustus Thomas and Tolstoy more alphabetical humor Gerhard Hauptmann and Robert Hitchens Voltaire and Henry Van Dyke Flaubert and John Fox Jr Balzac and John Kendrick Bangs Ostrowski and E. Phillips Oppenheim Eleanor Glenn and Théophile Gauthier Joseph Conrad and Robert W. Chambers Zola and Zanguel Midway on my scant shelf of novels between George Moore and Frank Norris there is just room enough for the two volumes of Daringforth by Frank A. Munsey 26. Virtuous Vandalism A hearing of Schumann's B-flat symphony of late otherwise a very caressing experience was corrupted by the thought that music would be much the gainer if musicians could get over their superstitious reverence for the mere text of the musical classics that reverence indeed is already subject to certain limitations hands have been laid at one time or another upon most of the immortal oratorios and even the awful name of Bach has not dissuaded certain German editors but it still swathes the standard symphonies like some vast armor of rubber and angel food and so imagination has to come to the aid of the flutes and fiddles when the band plays Schumann, Mozart, and even parts of Beethoven one discerns often quite clearly what the reverend master was aiming at but just as often one fails to hear it in precise tones this is particularly true of Schumann whose deficiency in instrumental cunning has passed into properb and in the B-flat symphony, his first venture into the epic form his failures are most numerous more than once, obviously attempting to roll up tone into a moving climax he succeeds only in muddling his colors I remember one place at the moment I can't recall where it is where the strings and the brass storm at one another in furious figures the blast of the brass, as the Bodvillian say, gets across but the fiddles merely scream absurdly the whole passage suggests the bleeding of sheep in the midst of a vast bellowing of bulls Schumann overestimated the horse power of fiddle music so far at the Eastering or underestimated the full kick of the trumpets other such soft spots are well known why then go on parroting Gaussheres that Schumann himself were he alive today would have long since corrected why not call an ecumenical council appoint a commission to see such things and then forget the sacrilege as a self-elected delicate from heathendom I nominate Dr. Richard Strauss as chairman when all is said and done Strauss probably knows more about writing for orchestra than any other two men that ever lived not excluding Wagner surely no living rival as Dr. Sunday would say has anything on him if after hearing a new composition by Strauss one turns to the music one is invariably surprised to find how simple it is the performance reveals so many purple moments so staggering an array of lusciousness that the ear is bemused into detecting scales and chords that never were on land or sea what the exploratory eye subsequently discovers perhaps is no more than our stout and comfortable old friend the highly world-born half-sprout Madame Sider with a vine leaf or two of C sharp minor or F major in her hair the trick lies in the tone color in the flabbergasting magic of the orchestration there are some moments in Electra when sounds come out of the orchestra that tug at the very roots of the hair sounds so unearthly that they suggest a caroling of dragons or beer fish and yet they are made by the same old fiddles that play the Kaiser Quartet and by the same old trombones at the Valkyrie ride like Witch's broomsticks and by the same old flutes that sob and snuffle in Tiddles serenade and in parts of Fjordsnot but Rojay must be rewritten by Strauss before a fjordshot is described there is one place where the harps taking a running start from the scrolls of the violins leaps slam bang through or is it into the firmament of heaven once when I heard this passage played at a concert a woman sitting beside me rolled over like a log and had to be hauled out by the ushers yes Strauss is the man to re-orchestrate the symphonies of Schumann particularly the B flat the Rhine-ish and the fourth I doubt that he could do much with Schubert for Schubert though he is dead nearly a hundred years yet remains curiously modern the unfinished symphony is full of exquisite color effects consider for example the rustling figure for the strings in the first movement and as for the C major it is so stupendous a debauch of melodic and harmonic beauty that one scarcely notices the colors at all in its slow movement mere loveliness and music probably says all that will ever be said but what of old Ludwig? har har here we begin pulling the whiskers of ball himself nevertheless I am vandal enough to wonder on sad Sunday mornings what Strauss could do with the first movement of the C minor more Strauss ever does it and lets me hear the result just once I'll be glad to serve six months in jail with him but in Munich of course and with a daily visitor's pass for Cousin Schor the conservatism which shrinks at such barbarities is the same conservatism which demands that the very typographical errors in the Bible be swallowed without salt and that has thus made a purile dreambook of parts of Holy Ritt if you want to see how far this last madness has led Christendom Astray take a look at an article by Abraham Mitri Ribbani an intelligent Syrian in the Atlantic Monthly of a couple of years ago the title of the article is the Oriental Manor of Speech and in it Ribbani shows how much of mere Oriental extravagance of metaphor is to be found in many celebrated passages and how little of literal significance this Oriental extravagance of course makes for beauty but as interpreted by pundits of no imagination it surely doesn't make for understanding what the Western world needs is a Bible in which the idioms of the Aramaic of thousands of years ago are translated into the idioms of today the man who undertook such a translation to be sure would be uproariously denounced just as Luther and Wycliffe were denounced but he could well afford to face the storm the various revised versions including the modern speech New Testament of Richard Francis Weymouth leave much to be desired they rectify many knife blunders and so make the whole narrative more intelligible but they still render most of the tropes of the original literally these tropes are not the substance of Holy Rift they are simply its color in the same way Myrtone color is not the substance of a musical composition Beethoven's eighth symphony is just as great a work in all its essentials in a forehand piano arrangement as in the original score every harmonic and melodic idea of the composer is there one can trace just as clearly the subtle processes of his mind every step in the working out of the materials is just as plain true enough there are orchestral compositions of which this cannot be reasonably said their color is so much more important than their form that when one takes away the former the latter almost seizes to exist but I doubt that many competent critics would argue that they belong to the first rank form after all is the important thing it is design that counts not decoration design and organization the pillars of a musical masterpiece are like the pillars of the Parthenon they are almost as beautiful bleached white as they were in all their original hues 28. A footnote on the duel of sex if I were a woman I should want to be a blonde with golden silky hair pink cheeks and sky blue eyes it would not bother me to think that this color scheme was mistaken by the world for a flaunting badge of stupidity I would have a better arm in my arsenal than mere intelligence I would get a husband by easy surrender while the brunettes attempted it vainly by frontal assault men are not easily taken by frontal assault it is only stratagem that can quickly knock them down to be a blonde pink soft and delicate is to be a stratagem it is to be a ruse of faint and ambush it is to fight under the red cross flag a man sees nothing alert in designing in those pale crystalline eyes he sees only something helpless, childish, weak something that calls to his compassion something that appeals powerfully to his conceit in his own strength and so he is taken before he knows that there is a war he lifts his portcullis in Christian charity and the enemy is in his citadel the brunette can make no such stealthy and sure attack no matter how subtle her art she can never hope to quite conceal her intent her eyes give her away they flash and glitter they have depths they draw the male gaze into mysterious and sinister recesses and so the male behind the gaze flies to arms he may be taken in the end indeed he usually is but he is not taken by surprise he is not taken without a fight a brunette has to battle for every inch of her advance she is confronted by an endless succession of dead man's hills each equipped with telescopes, semaphores, alarm gongs, wireless the male sees her clearly through her densest smoke clouds but the blonde captures him under a flag of truce he regards her tenderly, kindly, almost pittingly until the moment the jives are upon his wrists it is own optical matter, a question of color the pastel shades deceive him the louder he was sent him to his artillery God help I say the red-haired girl she goes into action with morning penance flying the dullest, blindest man can see her a mile away he can catch the alarming flash of her hair along before he can see the whites or even the terrible red browns of her eyes she has a long field to cross heavily under defensive fire before she can get into rifle range her quarry has a chance to throw up redoubts to dig himself in to call for reinforcements to elude her by ignominious flight she must win if she is to win it all by an unparalleled combination of craft and revolution she must be swift, daring, merciless even the brunette of black and penetrating eye has great advantages over her no wonder she never lets go once her arms are around her antagonist's neck no wonder she is of all women the hardest to shake off all nature works in circles causes become effects effects develop into causes the red-haired girl's dire need of courage and cunning has augmented her store of those qualities by the law of natural selection she is by long odds the most intelligent and bemusing of women she shows cunning, foresight, technique, variety she always fails a dozen times before she succeeds but she brings to the final business the abominable expertness of Eludendorf she has learned painfully by the process of trial and error red-haired girls are intellectual stimulants they know all the tricks they are so clever that they have even cast a false glimmer of beauty about their worst defect their harsh and gaudy hair they give it euphemistic and deceitful names auburn, bronze, Titian they overcome by their hellish arts that deep-seated dread of red which is inborn in all of God's creatures they charm men with what would even alarm bulls and the blondes by following the law of least resistance have gone in the other direction the great majority of them I speak, of course, of natural blondes not of the immoral wenches who work their atrocities under cover of a synthetic blondess are quite as shallow and stupid as they look one seldom hears a blonde say anything worth hearing the most they commonly achieve is a specious baby-like prattling an infantile artlessness but let us not blame them for nature's work why, after all, be intelligent it is at best no more than a capacity for unhappiness the blonde not only doesn't miss it but she is even better off without it what imaginable intelligence could compensate her for the flat blueness of her eyes lasanthus pallor of her hair the doll-like pink of her cheeks what conceivable cunning could do such execution as her stupendous appeal to masculine vanity sentimentality, eagolism if I were a woman I should want to be a blonde my blondness might be hideous but it would get me a husband and it would make him cherish me and love me 29. Alcohol envy, as I have said, is at the heart of the messianic delusion the mania to convert the happy sinner into a good man and so make him miserable and at the heart of that envy is fear the fear to sin, to take a chance to monkey with the buzzsaw this ineradicable fear is the outstanding mark of the fifth rate man at all times and everywhere it dominates his politics his theology his whole thinking he is a moral fellow because he is afraid to venture over the fence and he hates the man who is not the solemn proof so laboriously deduced by life insurance statistics that the man who uses alcohol even moderately dies slightly sooner than the teetotaler these proofs merely show that this man is one who leads an active and vigorous life and so faces hazards and uses himself up in brief one who lives at high tempo and with full joy what Nietzsche used to call the yog-seger or yes-sayer he may in fact die slightly sooner than the teetotaler but he lives infinitely longer moreover his life humanly speaking is much more worthwhile to himself and to the race he does the hard and dangerous work of the world he takes the chances he makes the experiments he is the soldier the artist the innovator the lover all the great works of man have been done by men who thus live joyously strenuously and perhaps a bit dangerously they have never been concerned about stretching life for two or three more years they have been concerned about making life and grossing and stimulating and a high adventure while it lasts teetotalism is as impossible to such men as any other manifestation of cowardice and if it were possible it would destroy their utility and significance just as certainly a man who shrinks from a cocktail before dinner on the ground that it may flabbergast his hormones and so make him die at 69 years 10 months and 5 days instead of at 69 years 11 months and 7 days such a man is as absurd a polltrune as the fellow who shrinks from kissing a woman on the ground and flora him with a chair leg each flees from a purely theoretical risk each is a useless encumberer of the earth and the sooner dead the better each is a discredit to the human race already discreditable enough bad nose teetotalism does not make for human happiness it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard the men who do things in the world the men worthy of admiration and imitation are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecsniffian stupidity their ideal is not a safe life but a full life they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage but the eagle in the air and in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos the alcohol myth is such a bugaboo the sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is always scared no wonder the Rockefellers and their like are hot for saving the working man from John Barley corn imagine the advantage to them of operating upon a flabby horde of timorous and joyless slaves afraid of all fun and kicking up horribly moral eager only to live as long as possible what mule-like fidelity and efficiency could be got out of such a rabble but how many Lincoln's would you get out of it and how many Jackson's and how many Grant's thirty thoughts on the voluptuous why has no publisher ever thought of perfuming his novels the final refinement of publishing already beddisoned by every other art Barabbas turned patronius for instance consider the bucolic romances of the hyphenated Mrs. Porter they have a subtle flavor of new moon hay and daffodils already why not add the actual essence or at all events some safe coal tar substitute and so help imagination to spread its wings for hall cane musk and synthetic bergamot for Mrs. Glenn and her neighbors on the tiger skin the fragrant blood of the red red rose for the ruffianish pages of Jack London the pungent hospitable smell of a first-class bar room that indescribable mingling of Marilyn Dry cigar smoke stale malt liquor radishes, potato salad and bloodwurst for the Dartmoor sagas of the interminable filipots the warm ammoniacal bouquet of cows poultry and yokels for the dodo school violets and Russian cigarettes for the venerable howls lavender and mignonette for Zola, Rochefort and wet leather for Mrs. Humphrey Ward lilies of the valley for Marie Corelli tuberoses and embalming fluid for chambers sachet and lip paint for but I leave you to make your own choices all I offer is the general idea it has been tried in the theater well do I remember the first weeks of Flora Dora at the old casino with a mannequin in the lobby squirting la flor de Flora Dora upon all us Flora Doran's I was put on trial for my life when I got home End of Part 3