University of California Berkeley
DAVID E. BELCH COLLECTION OF
H.L. MENCKEN
GiftofVakrieD. Bekh
DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY
DAMN!
A BOOK OF CALUMNY
BY H. L. MENCKEN
Second Printing
PHILIP GOODMAN COMPANY
NEW YORK NINETEEN EIGHTEEN
COPYRIGHT 1918 BY
PHILIP GOODMAN COMPANY
CONTENTS
I Pater Patrise 7
II The Reward of the Artist 9
III The Heroic Considered 10
IV The Burden of Humor 11
V The Saving Grace 13
VI Moral Indignation 14
VII Stable-Names 17
VIII The Jews 19
IX The Comstockian Premiss 22
X The Labial Infamy 28
XI A True Ascetic 28
XII On Lying 30
XIH History 32
XIV The Curse of Civilization 34
XV Eugenics 35
XVI The Jocose Gods 37
XVII War 38
XVIII Moralist and Artist 39
XIX. Actors 40
XX The Crowd 45
XXI An American Philosopher 48
XXII Clubs 49
XXIII Fidelis ad Urnum 50
XXIV A Theological Mystery 52
XXV The Test of Truth 53
XXVI Literary Indecencies 54
XXVII Virtuous Vandalism 55
XXVIII A Footnote on the Duel of
Sex 60
XXIX Alcohol 64
XXX Thoughts on the Voluptuous 67
XXXI The Holy Estate 69
XXXII Dichtung und Wahrheit 70
XXXIII Wild Shots 71
XXXIV Beethoven 73
XXXV The Tone Art 75
XXXVI Zoos 80
XXXVII On Hearing Mozart 86
XXXVIII The Road to Doubt 87
XXXIX A New Use for Churches 88
XL The Root of Religion 90
XLI Free Will 91
XLII Quid est Veritas? 95
XLIII The Doubter's Reward 96
XLIV Before the Altar 97
XLV The Mask 98
XL VI Pia Veneziani, poi Cristiani 99
XL VII Off Again, On Again 101
XLVIII Theology 102
XLIX Exemplia Gratia 103
DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY
I.
PATER PATRICE
If George Washington were alive today, what
a shining mark he would be for the whole
camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and pro-
fessional 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 de-
nounced their evils in harsh, specific terms. He
had a liking for all fortright and pugnacious
men, and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters
and all other such obscurantists. He was not
pious. He drank whisky 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 wis-
dom of the common people, but regarded them
as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the re-
public from them. He advocated no sure cure
for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted
that such a panacea existed. He took no inter-
est 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
Hell Hounds 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 the 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 re-
cruiting officer for insane asylums, a poisoner of
the home. The suffragettes would be on his
trail, with sentinels posted all along the Acco-
tink road. The initiators and referendors 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 Mann Act !
II
THE REWARD OF THE ARTIST
A man labors and fumes for a whole year to
write a symphony in G minor. He puts enor-
mous diligence into it, and much talent, and
maybe no little downright genius. It draws his
blood and wrings 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 au-
thentic hair from the whiskers of Henry Wads-
worth Longfellow.
Ill
THE HEROIC CONSIDERED
For humility and poverty, in themselves, the
world has little liking and less respect. In the
folk-lore of all races, despite the sentimentaliza-
tion of abasement for dramatic effect, it is al-
ways 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 protago-
nist. And of the real men and women of his-
tory, the most venerated and evied are those
whose early humiliations were but preludes to
terminal glories ; for example, Lincoln, Whit-
tington, Franklin, Columbus, Demosthenes,
Frederick the Great, Catherine, Mary of Mag-
dala, 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 hands. Even the Beati-
tudes, in the midst of their eloquent counselling
of renunciation, give it 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 ! . . .
10
IV
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 ac-
cept as a penetrating sagacity. Contrariwise,
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 smutty story the only
original art-form that America has yet contrib-
uted to literature. Huxley, had he not been the
greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might
have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pur-
suing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed
the devastating wit of a Moliere; his surviving
epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven,
after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the
ii
first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned
to the sardonic bull-fiddling of the scherzo.
No, there is not the slightest disharmony be-
tween sense and nonsense, humor and respecta-
bility, 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 reasonable-
ness? 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 flabber-
gasts 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 dis-
advantage, of pricked complacency, of sudden
and crushing defeat; and so, by an easy psy-
chological process, he is led into the idea that
the thing itself is incompatible with true dig-
nity of character and intellect. Hence his deep
suspicion of jokers, however adept their
thrusts. "What a damned fool!" this same
half-pitying tribute he pays to wit and butt
alike. He cannot separate the virtuoso of com-
edy 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 con-
done frivolity in a sage.
12
V
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!
VI
MORAL INDIGNATION
The loud, preposterous moral crusades that
so endlessly rock the republic against the rum
demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sun-
day moving-pictures, against dancing, against
fornication, against the cigarette, against all
things sinful and charming ^these astounding
Methodist jehads 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 neces-
sary to get it in favor of some new and super-
oppressive law is to convince it that that law
will be distasteful to the minority that it envies
and hates. The poor numskull who is so hor-
ribly harrowed by Puritan pulpit-thumpers
that he can't go to a ball game 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 offen-
sive happiness. The farmer who works 18
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 Even-
ing Post for a square and honest look at his
wife is envious of those gaudy drummers who
go gallivanting about the country with scarlet
girls; hence the Mann act. If these deviltries
were equally open to all men, and all men were
equally capable of appreciating them, their un-
popularity would tend to wither.
I often think, indeed, that the prohibitionist
tub-thumpers make a tactical mistake in dwell-
ing too much upon the evils and horrors of al-
cohol, and not enough upon its delights. A
few enlarged photographs of first-class bar-
rooms, showing the rows of well-fed, well-
dressed bibuli happily moored to the brass rails,
their noses in fragrant mint and hops and their
hands reaching out for free rations of olives,
pretzels, cloves, pumpernickle, Bismarck her-
ring, anchovies, schwartenmagen, wieners,
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 drunkards' 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 ven-
ture 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 brim-
stone and the corrective broomstick. . . .
16
VII
STABLE-NAMES
Why doesn't some patient drudge of a privat
dozent compile a dictionary of the stable-names
of the great? All show dogs and race horses, as
everyone knows, have stable-names. On the list
of entries a fast mare may appear as Czarina
Ogla Fedorovna, but in the stable she is not
that at all, nor even Czarina or Olga, but maybe
Lil or Jennie. And a prize bulldog, Champion
Zoroaster or Charlemagne XI. on the bench,
may be plain Jack or Ponto en famitte. So
with celebrities of the genus homo. Huxley's
official style and appellation was "The Right
Hon. Thomas Henry Huxley, P. C., M. D.,
Ph. D., LL. D., D. C. L., D. Sc., F. R. S.," and
his biographer tells us that he delighted in its
rolling grandeur but to his wife he was always
Hal. Shakespeare, to his fellows of his Bank-
side, was Will, and perhaps Willie to Ann Hath-
away. The Kaiser is another Willie: the late
Czar so addressed him in their famous exchange
of telegrams. The Czar himself was Nicky in
those days, and no doubt remains Nicky to his
intimates today. Edgar Allan 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 Lamb's was
Guy; Nietzsche's was Fritz; Whistler's was
Jimmie; the late King Edward's was Bertie;
17
Grover Cleveland's was Steve ; J. Pierpont Mor-
gan'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,
Henny, Enery, On'ry and Heinie. Which did Ann
Boleyn use when she cooed into the suspicious
ear of Henry VIII. ? To which did Henrik Ibsen
answer at the domestic hearth? It is difficult
to imagine his wife calling him Henrik: the
name is harsh, clumsy, razor-edged. But did
she make it Hen or Rik, or neither? What was
Bismarck to the Fiirstin, and to the mother he
so vastly feared? Ottchen? Somehow it seems
impossible. What was Grant to his wife ? Sure-
ly not Ulysses ! And Wolfgang Amadeus Mo-
zart? And Rutherford B. Hayes? Was Robert
Browning ever Bob? Was John Wesley ever
Jack? Was Emmanuel Swendenborg ever
Manny? Was Tadeusz Kosciusko ever Teddy?
A fair field of inquiry invites. Let some la-
borious assistant professor explore and chart
it. There will be more of human nature in his
report than in all the novels ever written.
18
VIII
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 goyim. In one
aspect they stand for the most savage practi-
cality ; in another aspect they are dreamers of
an almost fabulous other-worldiness. 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. Per-
haps, in many cases, it is due to an actual cor-
ruption 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 super-
terrestrial 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 Tatars or the democratic fallacies set
afloat by the French Revolution. The one
19
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 com-
pletely 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 Ital-
ian 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 demonology along with it, setting at
naught the collective intelligence of the human
species ; they embalmed their idiotic taboos and
fetishes in undying strains, and so gave them
some measure of the same immortality. A race
of lawgivers? Bosh! Leviticus is as archaic
as the Code of Manu, and the Decalogue is a
fossil. A race of seers ? Bosh again ! The God
they saw survives only as a bogey-man, a the-
ory, an uneasy and vexatious ghost. A race of
traders and sharpers ? Bosh a third time ! The
Jews are as poor as the Spaniards. But a race
20
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 good-
ness of the Lord God whoever He may be
might not be forgotten.
21
IX
THE COMSTOCKIAN PREMISS
It is argued against certain books, by virtu-
osi of moral alarm, that they depict vice as at-
tractive. This recalls the king who hanged a
judge for deciding that an archbishop was a
mammal.
22
THE 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, Pa., 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 meagre literature
with the endless books upon the other phenom-
ena of love, especially divorce and obstetrics.
Even Dr. Sturgeon, pioneering bravely, is un-
able 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 de-
scription of the act of kissing is made up of
sonorous gabble 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-asthmatic 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 leaden pallor. As for such salient symptoms
as the temperature, the pulse and the rate of
respiration, the learned pundit passes them over
23
without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons would
be a good one to write a sober and accurate
treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The
Family" and "Fear and Conventionality" indi-
cate her possession of the right sort of learning.
Even better would be a work by Havelock 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 unsur-
passed in the world. Surely there must be an
enormous mass of instructive 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 Christen-
dom is probably one of the things past finding
out. The Japanese, a very affectionate and
sentimental people, do not practise kissing in
any form ; they regard the act, in fact, with an
aversion matching our own aversion to the rub-
bing of noses. Nor is it in vogue among the
Moslems, nor among the Chinese, who counte-
nance it only as between mother and child. Even
in parts of Christendom it is girt about by rigid
taboos, so that its practise tends to be restrict-
ed to a few occasions. Two Frenchmen or Ital-
ians, when they meet, kiss each other on both
cheeks. One used to see, indeed, many pictures
of General Joffre thus bussing the heroes of
Verdun; there even appeared in print a story
to the effect that one of them objected to the
scratching of his moustache. But imagine two
24
Englishmen! kissing ! Or two Germans ! As
well imagined the former kissing the latter ! Such
a display of affection is simply impossible to
men 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 com-
punctions. 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 Corniche road, I passed a
hundred or so open taxicabs containing man and
woman, and fully 75 per cent, of the men had
their arms around their companions, and were
kissing them. These were not peasants, remem-
ber, 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 polite-
ness 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 com-
edy librettos, and (on the contrary side) chap-
erones and the gendarmerie make it out. The
physical sensation, far from being pleasant, is
25
intensely uncomfortable the suspension of res-
piration, indeed, quickly resolves itself into a
feeling of suffocation and the posture necessi-
tated by the approximation of lips and lips is
unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one.
Theoretically, a man kisses a woman perpen-
dicularly, with their eyes, those "windows of
the soul," synchronizing exactly. But actually,
on account of the incompressibility of the nasal
cartilages, 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 the
space between her eyebrows, while his left eye is
fixed upon some vague spot behind her. An in-
stantaneous photograph of such a maneuvre,
taken at the moment of incidence, would prob-
ably turn the stomach of even the most ro-
mantic man, and force him, in sheer self-re-
spect, to renounce kissing as he has renounced
leap-frog and walking on stilts. Only a wo-
man (for women are quite devoid of aesthetic
feeling) could survive so damning a picture.
But the most embarrassing moment, in kiss-
ing, does not come during the actual kiss (for
at that time the sensation of suffocation drives
out all purely psychical feelings), but imme-
diately afterward. What is one to say to the
woman then? The occasion obviously demands
some sort of remark. One has just received (in
theory) , *-oon; the silence begins to
make itself felt; there stands the fair one, ob-
viously waiting. Is one to thank her? Cer-
26
tainly that would be too transparent a piece
of hypocrisy, too flaccid a banality. Is one to
tell her that one loves her? Obviously, there is
danger in such assurances, and beside, one
usually doesn't, and a lie is a lie. Or is one
to descend to chatty commonplaces about 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, dis-
gust; even the girl herself gets enough.
XI
A TRUE ASCETIC
Herbert Spencer's objection to swearing, of
which so much has been made by moralists, was
not an objection to its sinfulness but an ob-
jection to its charm. In brief, he feared com-
fort, satisfaction, joy. The boarding houses
in which he dragged out his gray 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 theatre, personal adornment, philan-
dering, 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 be-
tween methods of locomotion on his holidays, he
chose going afoot, the most laborious and least
satisfying available. Brought to bay by his hu-
man need for a woman, he directed his fancy
toward George Eliot, probably the most unap-
petizing woman of his race and time. Drawn
irresistibly to music, he avoided the Fifth Sym-
phony and "Tristan und Isolde," and joined a
crowd of old maids singing part songs around a
cottage piano. John Tyndall saw clearly the
28
effect of all this and protested against it, say-
ing, "He'd be a much nicer fellow if he had a
good swear now and then" i. e., if he let go
now and then, if he yielded to his healthy hu-
man instincts now and then, if he went on some
sort of debauch now and then. But what Tyn-
dall overlooked was the fact that the meagreness
of his recreations was the very element that at-
tracted Spencer to them. Obsessed by the 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
ascetic. He could sacrifice all things of the
present for one thing of the future, all things
real for one thing ideal.
XII
ON LYING
Lying stands on a different plane from all
other moral offenses, not because it is intrinsi-
cally more heinous or less heinous, but simply
because it is the only one that may be accu-
rately measured. Forgetting unwitting error,
which has nothing to do with morals, a state-
ment is either true or not true. This is a sim-
ple distinction and relatively easy to establish.
But when one comes to other derelictions the
thing grows more complicated. The line be-
tween 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 mur-
der; there may be surrounding circumstances
which greatly condition the moral quality of the
actual act. But lying is specific, exact, scien-
tific. 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
30
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 recog-
nized crimes, from seduction to embezzlement.
Curiously enough, this master immorality of
them all is not prohibited by the Ten Command-
ments, nor is it penalized, in its pure form, by
the code of any civilized nation. Only savages
have laws against lying per se.
xm
HISTORY
It is the misfortune of humanity that its his-
tory is chiefly written by third-rate men. The
first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record
and philosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to
him, is an adventure, not a syllogism or an au-
topsy. Thus the writing of history is left to
college professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-
heads. Few historians, great or small, have
shown any capacity for the affairs they presume
to describe and interpret. Gibbon was an in-
glorious failure as a member of Parliament.
Thycydides made such a mess of his military
(or, rather, naval) command that he was exiled
from Athens for twenty years and finally assas-
sinated. Flavius Jusephus, serving as governor
of Galilee, lost the whole province to the Ro-
mans, and had to flee for his life. Momssen,
elected to the Prussian Landtag, flirted with the
Socialists. How much better we would under-
stand the habits and nature of man if there
were more historians like Julius Caesar, or even
like Niccolo 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 deduc-
tions, rumors, guesses. Again, such men know
32
how to tell the truth, however unpleasant ; they
are wholly free of that puerile 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.
33
XIV
THE CURSE OF CIVILIZATION
A civilized man's worst curse is social obliga-
tion. The most unpleasant act imaginable is
to go to a dinner party. One could get far bet-
ter food, taking one day with another, at
Childs', or even in a Pennsylvania Railroad din-
ing-car; one could find far more amusing so-
ciety 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 pretentions
without including at least one intensely dis-
agreeable person a vain and vapid girl, a hid-
eous woman, a follower of baseball, a stock-
broker, a veteran of some war. or other, a gab-
bler of politics. And one is enough to do the
business.
34
XV
EUGENICS
The error of the eugenists lies in the assump-
tion that a physically healthy man is the best
fitted to survive. This is true of rats and the
pedicvlae, but not of the higher animals, e. g. 9
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 Wassermann reactions !
The so-called social diseases, over which eu-
genists raise such a pother, are 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 inher-
itable, and that one is transmitted relatively sel-
dom. But among psychic characters one finds
that practically all are inheritable. For exam-
ple, stupidity, credulity, avarice, pecksniffery,
lack of imagination, hatred of beauty, mean-
ness, poltroonry, petty brutality, smallness of
35
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 con-
sumptive Jew with the fires of eternity in his
eyes, or an Iowa right-thinker with his hold full
of Bibles and breakfast food?
XVI
THE JOCOSE 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 Synge wrote "Riders to the
Sea" on a second-hand $40 typewriter, and
wore a celluloid collar. Richard Wagner made
a living, during four lean years, arranging Ital-
ian opera arias for the cornet. Herbert Spen-
cer sang bass in a barber-shop quartette and
was in love with George Eliot. William Shake-
speare 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 Hunjadi
Janos. ,
XVII
WAR
Superficially, war seems inordinately cruel
and 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 con-
structive 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
more jovian. The Greeks never represented the
inhabitants of Olympus as succoring and pro-
tecting one another, but always as 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. Besides, these forms of
death have the further disadvantage of being in-
glorious. The average man, dying in bed, not
only has to stand the pains and terrors of
death ; he must also, if he can bring himself to
think of it at all, stand the notion that he is
ridiculous. . . . The soldier is at least not
laughed at. Even his enemies treat his agonies
with respect.
XVIII
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, re-
lentless, fiercely earnest."
What could be more idiotic? Then Cotton
Mather was a greater man than Johann Sebas-
tian 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 Eugene Brieux,
with his Y. M. C. A. platitudinizing, is greater
than Moliere, 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 suffocat-
ing 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.
39
XIX
ACTORS
"In France they call an actor a m'as-tu-vu,
which, anglicised, means a have-you-seen-me ?
. . . The average actor holds the mirror up to
nature and sees in it only the reflection of him-
self." I take the words from a late book on the
so-called art of the mime by . the editor of a
magazine devoted to the stage. The learned au-
thor evades plumbing the psychological springs
of this astounding and almost invariable vanity,
this endless bumptiousness of the cabotin 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 bid-
den him be damned. There is, indeed, little
choice in the virulence of their self-respect be-
tween a Broadway star who is slobbered over by
press agents and fat women, and the poor ham
who plays thinking parts in a No. 7 road com-
pany. The two are alike charged to the limit;
one more ohm, or molecule, and they would
burst. Actors begin where militia colonels, Fifth
avenue rectors and Chautauqua orators leave
off. The most modest of them (barring, per-
haps, a few unearthly traitors to the craft)
matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girl
40
on a slow ship. In their lofty eminence of pom-
posity 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 arrant posturers and
wind-bags ? Why is it as surprising to find an
unassuming and likable 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, ingenious, ambitious young fellow? Is he
the young fellow with ideas in him, and a yearn-
ing for hard and difficult work? Is he the dili-
gent reader, the hard student, the eager inquir-
er? No. He is, in the overwhelming main, the
neighborhood fop and beau, the human clothes-
horse, the nimble squire of dames. The youths
of more active mind, emerging from adolescence,
turn 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 mettle
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 incompe-
tent creature, a strutter and poseur, a popin-
jay, 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 pro-
fession requiring little more information, cul-
ture or capacity for ratiocination than that of
the lady of joy, and surrounded in his work-
shop by men who are as stupid, as vain and as
empty as he himself will be in the years to come,
he suffers an arrest of development, and the lit-
tle 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 the cerebrum of a floor-walker and
the vanity of a fashionable clergyman. The re-
sult, 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
sailors' boarding-house.
By the same token, the relatively greater in-
telligence of actresses is explained. They are,
at their worst, quite as bad as the generality of
actors. There are she-stars who are all tem-
perament and balderdash intellectually speak-
ing, beggars on horseback, servant girls well
42
washed. But no one who knows anything about
the stage need be told that it can show a great
many more quick-minded and self-respecting
women than intelligent men. And why? Sim-
ply because its women are recruited, in the
main, from a class much above that which fur-
nishes its men. It is, after all, not unnatural
for a woman of considerable intelligence to as-
pire 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-scoff ed-at intruder, but on the boards she
can meet men on an equal footing. It is, there-
fore, no wonder that women of a relatively su-
perior class often take to the business. . .
Once they embrace it, their superiority to their
male colleagues is quickly manifest. All move-
ments 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 Ib-
sen pioneers were such women as Helena Mod-
jeska, Agnes Sorma and Janet Achurch; the
men all hung back. Ibsen, it would appear,
was aware of this 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 ten-
dency against great difficulties. They have to
carry a heavy handicap in the enormous num-
ber of women who seek the footlights merely
43
to advertise their real profession, but despite
all this, anyone who has the slightest acquaint-
ance with stagefolk 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 com-
munion with the strutting brethren psycholog-
ically impossible. Stock-brokers, dramatists
and even theatrical managers are greatly to be
preferred.
A A
XX
THE CROWD
Gustave Le Bon and his school, in their dis-
cussions 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 in-
feriors. 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 sim-
ian. Crowds, properly worked up by skilful
demagogues, are ready to believe anything, and
to do anything.
Le Bon, I daresay, is partly right, but also
partly wrong. His theory is probably too flat-
tering to the average numskull. He accounts
for the extravagance of crowds on the assump-
tion that the numskull, 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 numskull runs amuck 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 numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He re-
frains from all attempts at lynching a cappella,
not because it takes suggestion to make him
desire to lynch, but because it takes the pro-
tection 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 straightway
reduced to the level of the underlying stone-
heads. 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 blackamoor 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 real-
ize 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 major-
ity of its members in all those members, that
is, who are naturally ignorant and vicious
perhaps 95 per cent. All studies of mob psy-
chology are defective in that they underesti-
mate 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-re-
straint, the sense of justice, courage these
virtues belong only to a small minority of men.
This minority never runs amuck. Its most dis-
tinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance
to all running amuck. The third-rate man,
though 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 ap-
peal to his emotions. A whoop strips off his
disguise.
XXI
AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER
As for William Jennings Bryan, of whom so
much piffle, pro and con, has been written, the
whole of his political philosophy may be re-
duced to two propositions, neither of which is
true. The first is the proposition that the com-
mon people are wise and honest, and the sec-
ond 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.
XXII
CLUBS
Men's clubs have but one intelligible pur-
pose: 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 agree-
able woman to talk to. This is particularly
true of married men. Those of them that one
finds in clubs answer to a general description:
they have wives too unattractive to entertain
them, and yet too watchful to allow them to
seek entertainment elsewhere. The bachelors,
in the main, belong to two classes: (a) those
who have been unfortunate in amour, and are
still too sore to show any new enterprise, and
(b) those so lacking in charm that no woman
will pay any attention to them. Is it any won-
der 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 highballs, shooting
pool, and reading the barber-shop weeklies?
. . . The day a man's mistress is married one
always finds him at his club.
XXIII.
FIDELIS AD URNUM
Despite the common belief of women to the
contrary, fully 95 per cent, 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 in-
itiative 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 connubial
rectitude is lack of means. A mistress costs a
great deal more than a wife; in the open mar-
ket 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 per cent, of married men
are faithful. I believe the real proportion is
nearer 99 per cent. What women mistake for
infidelity is usually no more than vanity. Every
man likes to be regarded as a devil of a fel-
low, 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
50
martyrdom which is perhaps woman'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 under-
wear.
XXIV
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 cosmic 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 its use, then, to prepare him for hap-
piness 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.
XXV
THE TEST OF TRUTH
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few
religious dogmas have ever faced it and sur-
vived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the
Gadarene swine. Dowie's whiskers broke the
back of Dowieism. 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 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. . . .
XXVI
LITERARY INDECENCIES
The low, graceless humor of names ! On my
shelf of poetry, arranged by the alphabet, Col-
eridge and J. Gordon Cooglar are next-door
neighbors! Mrs. Hemans is beside Laurence
Hope! Walt Whitman rubs elbows with Ella
Wheeler Wilcox; Robert Browning with Rich-
ard Burton; Rossetti with Cale Young Rice;
Shelly with Clinton Scollard ; Wordsworth with
George E. Woodberry; John Keats with Her-
bert Kaufman !
Ibsen, on the shelf of dramatists, is between
Victor Hugo and Jerome K. Jerome. Suder-
mann follows Harriet Beecher Stowe. Maeter-
linck shoulders Percy Mackaye. Shakespeare
is between Sardou and Shaw. Euripides and
Clyde Fitch! Upton Sinclair and Sophocles!
Aeschylus and F. Anstey! D'Annunzio and
Richard Harding Davis! Augustus Thomas
and Tolstoi !
More alphabetical humor. Gerhart Haupt-
mann and Robert Hichens ; Voltaire and Henry
Van Dyke ; Flaubert and John Fox, Jr. ; Balzac
and John Kendrick Bangs; Ostrovsky and E.
Phillips Oppenheim ; Elinor Glyn and Theophile
Gautier ; Joseph Conrad and Robert W. Cham-
bers ; Zola and Zangwill ! . . .
Midway on my scant shelf of novels, between
George Moore and Frank Norris, there is just
room enough for the two volumes of "Derring-
ford," by Frank A. Munsey.
54
XXVII
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
Jbe 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 stand-
ard 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 proverb. And in the B flat symphony, his
first venture into the epic form, his failures are
most numerous. More than once, obviously at-
tempting to roll up tone into a moving climax,
he succeeds only in muddling his colors. I re-
member 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
55
blast of the brass, as the vaudevillains say, gets
across but the fiddles merely scream absurdly.
The whole passage suggests the bleating of
sheep in the midst of a vast bellowing of bulls.
Schumann overestimated the horsepower of fid-
dle music so far up the E string or under-
estimated the full kick of the trumpets. . . .
Other such soft spots are well known.
Why, then, go on parroting gaucheries that
Schumann himself, were he alive today, would
have long since corrected? Why not call an
ecumenical council, appoint a commission to see
to such things, and then forget the sacrilege?
As a self-elected delegate 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 exclud-
ing 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 sur-
prised to find how simple it is. The perform-
ance reveals so many purple moments, so stag-
gering an array of lusciousness, that the ear is
bemused into detecting scales and chords that
never were on land or sea. WTiat the explora-
tory eye subsequently discovers, perhaps, is no
more than our stout and comfortable old friend,
the highly well-born hausfrau, Mme. C Dur
with a vine leaf or two of C sharp minor or F
major in her hair. The trick lies in the tone-
56
color in the flabbergasting magic of the or-
chestration. There are some moments in "Elek-
tra" 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 bierfisch and yet they are made by
the same old fiddles that play the Kaiser Quar-
tet, and by the same old trombones that the
Valkyrie ride like witch's broomsticks, and by
the same old flutes that sob and snuffle in TitTs
Serenade. And in parts of "Feuersnot" but
Roget must be rewritten by Strauss before
"Feuersnot" is described. There is one place
where the harps, taking a running start from
the scrolls of the violins, leap slambang 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 reorchestrate the
symphonies of Schumann, particularly the B
flat, the Rhenish 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 melo-
dic and harmonic beauty that one scarcely no-
tices the colors at all. In its slow movement
57
mere loveliness in music probably says all that
will ever be said. . . . But what of old Lud-
wig? Har, har; here we begin pulling the whis-
kers of Baal Himself. Nevertheless, I am van-
dal enough to wonder, on sad Sunday mornings,
what Strauss could do with the first movement
of the C minor. More, if 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 Pschorr! . . .
The conservatism which shrinks at such bar-
barities is the same conservatism which demands
that the very typographical errors in the Bible
be swallowed without salt, and that has thus
made a puerile dream-book of parts of Holy
Writ. If you want to see how far this last mad-
ness has led Christendom astray, take a look
at an article by Abraham Mitrie Rihbany, an
intelligent Syrian, in the Atlantic Monthly of
a couple of years ago. The title of the article
is "The Oriental Manner of Speech," and in it
Rihbany shows how much of mere Oriental ex-
travagance of metaphor is to be found in many
celebrated passages, and how little of literal sig-
nificance. 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
58
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 naif
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
Writ; they are simply its color. In the same
way mere tone-color is not the substance of a
musical composition. Beethoven's Eighth Sym-
phony is just as great a work, in all its essen-
tials, in a four-hand piano arrangement as in
the original score. Every harmonic and mel-
odic 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 ma-
terials is just as plain. True enough, there are
orchestral compositions of which this cannot be
reasonably said ; their color is so much more im-
portant than their form that when one takes
away the former the latter almost ceases to ex-
ist. 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 master-
piece are like the pillars of the Parthenon ; they
are almost as beautiful bleached white as they
were in all their original hues.
59
XXVIII
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 strategem that can quickly knock
them down. To be a blonde, pink, soft and del-
icate, is to be a strategem. It is to be a ruse, a
feint, an ambush. It is to fight under the Red
Cross flag. A man sees nothing alert and de-
signing in those pale, crystalline eyes; he sees
only something helpless, childish, weak ; some-
thing 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 port-
cullis in Christian charity and the enemy is in
Jiis 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 sa
60
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 clear-
ly through her densest smoke-clouds. . . . But
the blonde captures him under a flag of truce.
He regards her tenderly, kindly, almost pitying-
ly, until the moment the gyves are upon his
wrists.
It is all an optical matter, a question of
color. The pastel shades deceive him ; the louder
hues send him to his artillery. God help, I say,
the red-haired girl! She goes into action with
warning pennants flying. The dullest, blindest
man can see her a mile away; he can catch the
alarming flash of her hair long before he can
see the whites, or even the terrible red-browns,
of her eyes. She has a long field to cross, heav-
ily 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 rein-
forcements, to elude her by ignominious flight.
She must win, if she is to win at all, by an un-
paralleled combination of craft and resolu-
tion. 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
61
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 wom-
en. 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 a Ludendorff ; she
has learnt painfully by the process of trial and
error. Red-haired girls are intellectual stimu-
lants. They know all the tricks. They are so
clever that they have even cast a false glamour
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 syn-
thetic blondeness are quite as shallow and
stupid as they look. One seldom hears a blonde
say anything worth hearing ; the most they com-
monly achieve is a specious, baby-like prattling,
62
an infantile artlessness. But let us not blame
them for nature's work. Why, after all, be in-
telligent? It is, at best, no more than a capa-
ity for unhappiness. The blonde not only
doesn't miss it; she is even better off without
it. What imaginable intelligence could compen-
sate her for the flat blueness of her eyes, the
xanthous 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, egoism?
If I were a woman I should want to be a
blonde. By blondeness might be hideous, but it
would get me a husband, and it would make him
cherish me and love me.
63
XXIX
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 mon-
key with the buzzsaw. This ineradicable fear is
the outstanding mark of the fifth-rate man, at
all times and everywhere. It dominates his poli-
tics, 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 proofs, so laboriously deduced
from life insurance statistics, that the man who
uses alcohol, even moderately, dies slightly soon-
er 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 ja-sager, 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 worth while, 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
64
who thus lived joyously, strenuously, and per-
haps a bit dangerously. They have never been
concerned about stretching life for two or three
more years ; they have been concerned about
making life engrossing and stimulating and a
high adventure while it lasts. Teetotalism is as
impossible to such men as any other manifesta-
tion 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,
ten months and five days instead of at 69 years,
eleven months and seven days such a man is as
absurd a poltroon as the fellow who shrinks
from kissing a woman on the ground that she
may floor him with a chair leg. Each flees
from a purely theoretical risk. Each is a use-
less encumberer of the earth, and the sooner
dead the better. Each is a discredit to the hu-
man race, already discreditable enough, God
knows.
Teetotalism does not make for human happi-
ness ; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of
the barnyard. The men who do things in the
world, the men worthy of admiration and imi-
tation, are men constitutionally incapable of
any such pecksniffian 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
65
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 workingman from John
Barleycorn ! Imagine the advantage to them
of operating upon a flabby horde of timorous
and joyless slaves, afraid of all fun and kick-
ing 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 Lincolns would you get out of
it, and how many Jacksons, and how many
Grants?
66
XXX
THOUGHTS ON THE VOLUPTUOUS
Why has no publisher ever thought of per-
fuming his novels ? The final refinement of pub-
lishing, already bedizened by every other art!
Barabbas turned Petronius ! For instance, con-
sider the bucolic romances of the hyphenated
Mrs. Porter. They have a subtle flavor of new-
mown 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 Caine, musk and
synthetic bergamot. For Mrs. Glyn 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 Maryland rye, cigar smoke, stale
malt liquor, radishes, potato salad and blut-
wurst. For the Dartmoor sagas of the inter-
minable Phillpotts, the warm ammoniacal bou-
quet of cows, poultry and yokels. For the
"Dodo" school, violets and Russian cigarettes.
For the venerable Howells, lavender and
mignonette. For Zola, Rochef ort and wet leath-
er. For Mrs. Humphrey Ward, lilies of the
valley. For Marie Corelli, tuberoses and em-
balming 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 theatre. Well do I remember the first
weeks of "Florodora" at the old Casino, with
a mannikin in the lobby squirting "La Flor de
Florodora" upon all us Florodorans. ... I
was put on trial for my life when I got home !
XXXI
THE HOLY ESTATE
Marriage is always a man's second choice. It
is entered upon, more often than not, as the saf-
est form of intrigue. The caitiff yields quick-
est; the man who loves danger and adventure
holds out longest. Behind it one frequently
finds, not that lofty romantic passion which
poets hymn, but a mere yearning for peace and
security. The abominable hazards of the high
seas, the rough humors and pestilences of the
forecastle these drive the timid mariner
ashore. . . . The authentic Cupid, at least in
Christendom, was discovered by the late Albert
Ludwig Siegmund Neisser in 1879.
60
XXXII
DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT
Deponent, being duly sworn, saith : My taste
in poetry is for delicate and fragile things to
be honest, for artificial things. I like a frail but
perfectly articulated stanza, a sonnet Wrought
like ivory, a song full of glowing nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions,
prepositions and participles, but without too
much hard sense to it. Poetry, to me, has but
two meanings. On the one hand, it is a magical
escape from the sordidness of metabolism and
the class war, and on the other hand it is a sub-
tle, very difficult and hence very charming art,
like writing fugues or mixing mayonnaise. I
do not go to poets to be taught anything, or
to be heated up to indignation, or to have my
conscience blasted out of its torpor, but to be
soothed and caressed, to be lulled with sweet
sounds, to be wooed into forgetfulness, to be
tickled under the metaphysical chin. My favor-
ite poem is Lizette Woodworth Reese's "Tears,"
which, as a statement of fact, seems to me to
be as idiotic as the Book of Revelation. The
poetry I regard least is such stuff as that of
Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold, which
argues and illuminates. I dislike poetry of in-
tellectual content as much as I dislike women
of intellectual content and for the same rea-
son.
XXXIII
WILD SHOTS
If I had the time, and there were no sweeter
follies offering, I should like to write an essay
on the books that have quite failed of achieving
their original purposes, and are yet of respect-
able use and potency for other purposes. For
example, the Book of Revelation. The obvious
aim of the learned author of this work was to
bring the early Christians into accord by tell-
ing them authoritatively what to expect and
hope for ; its actual effect during eighteen hun-
dred years has been to split them into a multi-
tude of camps, and so set them to denouncing,
damning, jailing and murdering one another.
Again, consider the autobiography of Benve-
nuto Cellini. Ben wrote it to prove that he
was an honest man, a mirror of all the virtues,
an injured innocent; the world, reading it, hails
him respectfully as the noblest, the boldest, the
gaudiest liar that ever lived. Again, turn to
"Gulliver's Travels." The thing was planned
by its rev. author as a devastating satire, a ter-
rible piece of cynicism; it survives as a story-
book for sucklings. Yet again, there is "Ham-
let." Shakespeare wrote it frankly to make
money for a theatrical manager; it has lost
money for theatrical managers ever since. Yet
again, there is Caesar's "De Bello Gallico."
Julius composed it to thrill and arouse the Ro-
mans ; its sole use today is to stupefy and sicken
7i
schoolboys. Finally, there is the celebrated
book of General F. von Bernhardi. He wrote
it to inflame Germany ; its effect was to inflame
England. . . .
The list might be lengthened almost ad infini-
tum. When a man writes a book he fires a ma-
chine gun into a wood. The game he brings
down often astonishes him, and sometimes hor-
rifies him. Consider the case of Ibsen. . . .
After my book on Nietzsche I was actually in-
vited to lecture at Princeton.
XXXIV
BEETHOVEN
Romain Holland's "Beethoven," one of the
cornerstones of his celebrity as a critic, is based
upon a thesis that is of almost inconceivable in-
accuracy, to wit, the thesis that old Ludwig was
an apostle of joy, and that his music reveals his
determination to experience and utter it in spite
of all the slings and arrows of outrageous for-
tune. Nothing could be more absurd. Joy, in
truth, was precisely the emotion that Beethoven
could never conjure up; it simply was not in
him. Turn to scherzo of any of his trios, quar-
tets, sonatas or symphonies. A sardonic wag-
gishness is there, and sometimes even a wistful
sort of merriment, but joy in the real sense
a kicking up of legs, a light-heartedness, a
complete freedom from care is not to be found.
It is in Haydn, it is in Schubert and it is often
in Mozart, but it is no more in Beethoven than
it is in Tschaikovsky. Even the hymn to joy
at the end of the Ninth symphony narrowly
escapes being a gruesome parody on the thing
itself ; a conscious effort is in every note of it ;
it is almost as lacking in spontaneity as (if it
were imaginable at all) a piece of vers libre by
Augustus Montague Toplady.
Nay ; Ludwig was no leaping buck. Nor was it
his deafness, nor poverty, nor the crimes of his
rascally nephew that pumped joy out of him.
The truth is that he lacked it from birth; he
73
was born a Puritan and though a Puritan may
also become a great man (as witness Herbert
Spencer and Beelzebub) , he can never throw off
being a Puritan. Beethoven stemmed from the
Low Countries, and the Low Countries, in those
days, were full of Puritan refugees; the very
name, in its first incarnation, may have been
Barebones. If you want to comprehend the au-
thentic man, don't linger over Holland's fancies
but go to his own philosophizings, as garnered
in "Beethoven, the Man and the Artist," by
Friedrich Kerst, Englished by Krehbiel. Here
you will find a collection of moral banalities that
would have delighted Jonathan Edwards a col-
lection that might well be emblazoned on gilt
cards and hung in Sunday schools. He begins
with a naif anthropomorphism that is now al-
most perished from the world; he ends with a
solemn repudiation of adultery. . . . But a
great man, my masters, a great man ! We have
enough biographies of him, and talmuds upon
his works. Who will do a full-length psycholog-
ical study of him?
74
XXXV
THE TONE ART
The notion that the aim of art is to fix the
shifting aspects of nature, that all art is pri-
marily representative this notion is as un-
sound as the theory that Friday is an unlucky
day, and is dying as hard. One even finds some
trace of it in Anatole France, surely a man who
should know better. The true function of art
is to criticise, embellish and edit nature par-
ticularly to edit it, and so make it coherent and
lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned
proof-reader, blue-pencilling the lapsus calami
of God. The sounds in a Beethoven symphony,
even the Pastoral, are infinitely more orderly,
varied and beautiful than those of the woods.
The worst flute is never as bad as the worst so-
prano. The best violoncello is immeasurably
better than the best tenor.
All first-rate music suffers by the fact that it
has to be performed by human beings that is,
that nature must be permitted to corrupt it.
The performance one hears in a concert hall or
opera house is no more than a baroque parody
upon the thing the composer imagined. In an
orchestra of eighty men there is inevitably at
least one man with a sore thumb, or bad kidneys,
or a brutal wife, or katzen jammer and one is
enough. Some day the natural clumsiness and
imperfection of fingers, lips and larynxes
75
be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall
have Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert in
such wonderful and perfect beauty that it will
be almost unbearable. If half as much ingen-
uity had been lavished upon music machines as
has been lavished upon the telephone and the
steam engine, we would have had mechanical or-
chestras long ago. Mechanical pianos are al-
ready here. Piano-players, bound to put some
value on the tortures of Czerny, affect to laugh
at all such contrivances, but that is no more
than a pale phosphorescence of an outraged
wille zur macht. Setting aside half a dozen
perhaps a dozen great masters of a moribund
craft, who will say that the average mechanical
piano is not as competent as the average
pianist?
When the human performer of music goes the
way of the galley-slave, the charm of personal-
ity, of course, will be pumped out of the per-
formance of music. But the charm of person-
ality does not help music; it hinders it. It is
not a reinforcement to music; it is a rival.
When a beautiful singer comes upon the stage,
two shows, as it were, go on at once: first the
music show, and then the arms, shoulders, neck,
nose, ankles, eyes, hips, calves and ruby lips
in brief, the sex-show. The second of these
shows, to the majority of persons present, is
more interesting than the first to the men be-
cause of the sex interest, and to the women be-
cause of the professional or technical interest
76
and so music is forced into the background.
What it becomes, indeed, is no more than a half-
heard accompaniment to an imagined anecdate,
just as color, line and mass become mere ac-
complishments to an anecdote in a picture by an
English academician, or by a sentimental Ger-
man of the Boecklin school.
The purified and dephlogisticated music of
the future, to be sure, will never appeal to the
mob, which will keep on demanding its chance
to gloat over gaudy, voluptuous women, and
fat, scandalous tenors. The mob, even disre-
garding its insatiable appetite for the improper,
is a natural hero worshiper. It loves, not the
beautiful, but the strange, the unprecedented,
the astounding; it suffers from an incurable
heliogabalisme. A soprano who can gargle her
way up to G sharp in altissimo interests it al-
most as much as a contralto who has slept pub-
licly with a grand duke. If it cannot get the
tenor who receives $3,000 a night, it will take
the tenor who fought the manager with bung-
starters last Tuesday. But this is merely say-
ing that the tastes and desires of the mob have
nothing to do with music as an art. For its
ears, as for its eyes, it demands anecdotes on
the one hand the Suicide symphony, "The Forge
in the Forest," and the general run of Italian
opera, and on the other hand such things as
"The Angelus," "Playing Grandpa" and the so-
called "Mona Lisa." It cannot imagine art as
devoid of moral content, as beauty pure and
77
simple. It always demands something to edify
it, or, failing that, to shock it.
These concepts, of the edifying and the
shocking, are closer together in the psyche than
most persons imagine. The one, in fact, de-
pends upon the other : without some definite no-
tion of the improving it is almost impossible to
conjure up an active notion of the improper.
All salacious art is addressed, not to the
damned, but to the consciously saved ; it is Sun-
day-school superintendents, not bartenders, who
chiefly patronize peep-shows, and know the dirty
books, and have a high artistic admiration for
sopranos of superior gluteal development. The
man who has risen above the petty ethical super-
stitions of Christendom gets little pleasure out
of impropriety, for very few ordinary phenom-
ena seem to him to be improper. Thus a
Frenchman, viewing the undraped statues which
bedizen his native galleries of art, either enjoys
them in a purely aesthetic fashion which is
seldom possible save when he is in liquor or
confesses frankly that he doesn't like them at
all ; whereas the visiting Americano is so power-
fully shocked and fascinated by them that one
finds him, the same evening, in places where no
respectable man ought to go. All art, to this
fellow, must have a certain bawdiness, or he
cannot abide it. His favorite soprano, in the
opera house, is not the fat and middle-aged
lady who can actually sing, but the girl with
the bare back and translucent drawers. Con-
78
descending to the concert hall, he is bored by
the posse of enemy aliens in funereal black, and
so demands a vocal soloist that is, a gaudy
creature of such advanced corsetting that she
can make him forget Bach for a while, and
turn his thoughts pleasantly to amorous in-
trigue.
In all this, of course, there is nothing new.
Other and better men have noted the damage
that the personal equation does to music, and
some of them have even sought ways out. For
example, Richard Strauss. His so-called ballet,
^" Josefs Legend," produced in Paris just be-
fore the war, is an attempt to write an opera
without singers. All of the music is in the or-
chestra ; the folks on the stage merely go
through a pointless pantomime; their main
function is to entertain the eye with shifting
colors. Thus, the romantic sentiments of Jo-
seph are announced, not by some eye-rolling
tenor, but by the first, second, third, fourth,
fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth violins (it is a
Strauss score!), with the incidental aid of the
wood-wind, the brass, the percussion and the
rest of the strings. And the heroine's reply is
made, not by a soprano with a cold, but by an
honest man playing a flute. The next step will
be the substitution of marionettes for actors.
The removal of the orchestra to a sort of
trench, out of sight of the audience, is already
an accomplished fact at Munich. The end, per-
haps, will be music purged of its current pto-
maines. In brief, music.
79
XXXVI
zoos
I often wonder how much sound and nourish-
ing food is fed to the animals in the zoological
gardens of America every week, and try to fig-
ure out what the public gets in return for the
cost thereof. The annual bill must surely run
into millions; one is constantly hearing how
much beef a lion downs at a meal, and how
many tons of hay an elephant dispatches in a
month. And to what end? To the end, princi-
pally, that a horde of superintendents and keep-
ers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end,
secondarily, that the least intelligent minority
of the population may have an idiotic show to
gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the
young of the species may be instructed in the
methods of amour prevailing among chimpan-
zees and become privy to the technic employed
by jaguars, hyenas and polar bears in ridding
themselves of lice.
So far as I can make out, after laborious vis-
its to all the chief zoos of the nation, no other
imaginable purpose is served by their existence.
One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from
the gentlemen they support) that they are edu-
cational. But how? Just what sort of instruc-
tion do they radiate, and what is its value? I
have never been able to find out. The sober
truth is that they are no more educational than
so many firemen's parades or displays of sky-
So
rockets, and that all they actually offer to the
public in return for the taxes wasted upon them
is a form of idle and witless amusement, com-
pared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even
to Congress or a state legislature in session, is
informing, stimulating and ennobling.
Education your grandmother! Show me a
schoolboy who has ever learned anything val-
uable or important by watching a mangy old
lion snoring away in its cage or a family of
monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any use-
ful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpa-
bly impossible; not even a college professor is
improved by it. The most it can imaginably
impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of
tiger run one way and the stripes of another
sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats
smell worse than Greek 'bus boys, that the Latin
name of the raccoon (who was unheard of by
the Romans) is Procyon lot or. For the dis-
semination of such banal knowledge, absurdly
emitted and defectively taken in, the taxpayers
of the United States are mulcted in hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year. As well make them
pay for teaching policemen the theory of least
squares, or for instructing roosters in the laying
of eggs.
But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value.
They enable learned men to study this or that.
Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific
discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the
animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo.
81
The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology,
and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not
in the groves of actual learning, but in the yel-
low journals. He is to biology what the late
Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which
is to say, its court jester and reductio ad ab-
surdum. When he leaps into public notice with
some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns
out to be no more than the news that Marie
Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had
her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting
twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alli-
gator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that
Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother
Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail,
nose and remaining ear.
Science, of course, has its uses for the lower
animals. A diligent study of their livers and
lights helps to an understanding of the anat-
omy and physiology, and particularly of the
pathology, of man. They are necessary aids in
devising and manufacturing many remedial
agents, and in testing the virtues of those al-
ready devised; out of the mute agonies of a
rabbit or a calf may come relief for a baby with
diphtheria, or means for an archdeacon to es-
cape the consequences of his youthful follies.
Moreover, something valuable is to be got out
of a mere study of their habits, instincts and
ways of mind knowledge that, by analogy, may
illuminate the parallel doings of the germs homo,
and so enable us to comprehend the primitive
82
mental processes of Congressmen, morons and
the rev. clergy.
But it must be obvious that none of these
studies can be made in a zoo. The zoo animals,
to begin with, provide no material for the biol-
ogist; he can find out no more about their in-
sides than what he discerns from a safe distance
and through the bars. He is not allowed to try
his germs and specifics upon them ; he is not al-
lowed to vivisect them. If he would find out
what goes on in the animal body under this con^
dition or that, he must turn from the inhab-
itants of the zoo to the customary guinea pigs
and street dogs, and buy or steal them for him-
self. Nor does he get any chance for profitable
inquiry when zoo animals die (usually of lack
of exercise or ignorant doctoring), for their
carcasses are not handed to him for autopsy,
but at once stuffed with gypsum and excelsior
and placed in some museum.
Least of all do zoos produce any new knowl-
edge about animal behavior. Such knowledge
must be got, not from animals penned up and
tortured, but from animals in a state of nature.
A college professor studying the habits of the
giraffe, for example, and confining his observa-
tions to specimens in zoos, would inevitably
come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a
sedentary and melancholy beast, standing im-
movable for hours at a time and employing an
Italian to feed him hay and cabbages. As well
proceed to a study of the psychology of a juris-
83
consult by first immersing him in Sing Sing,
or of a juggler by first cutting off his hands.
Knowledge so gained is inaccurate and imbecile
knowledge. Not even a college professor, if
sober, would give it any faith and credit.
There remains, then, the only true utility of
a zoo: it is a childish and pointless show for
the unintelligent, in brief, for children, nurse-
maids, visiting yokels and the generality of the
defective. Should the taxpayers be forced to
sweat millions for such a purpose ? I think not.
The sort of man who likes to spend his time
watching a cage of monkeys chase one another,
or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is
precisely the sort of man whose mental weak-
ness should be combatted at the public expense,
and not fostered. He is a public liability and a
public menace, and society should seek to im-
prove him. Instead of that, we spend a lot of
money to feed his degrading appetite and
further paralyze his mind. It is precisely as if
the community provided free champagne for
dipsomaniacs, or hired lecturers to convert the
army to the doctrines of the Bolsheviki.
Of the abominable cruelties practised in zoos
it is unnecessary to make mention. Even assum-
ing that all the keepers are men of delicate na-
tures and ardent zoophiles (which is about as
safe as assuming that the keepers of a prison
are all sentimentalists, and weep for the sorrows
of their charges), it must be plain that the vork
they do involves an endless war upon the native
84
instincts of the animals, and that they must thus
inflict the most abominable tortures ever}' day.
What could be a sadder sight than a tiger in a
cage, save it be a forest monkey climbing dis-
pairingly up a barked stump, or an eagle
chained to its roost? How can man be bene-
fitted and made better by robbing the seal of its
arctic ice, the hippopotamus of its soft wallow,
the buffalo of its open range, the lion of its
kingship, the birds of their air?
I am no sentimentalist, God knows. I am in
favor of vivisection unrestrained, so long as the
vivisectionist knows what he is about. I advo-
cate clubbing a dog that barks unnecessarily,
which all dogs do. I enjoy hangings, particu-
larly of converts to the evangelical faiths. The
crunch of a cockroach is music to my ears. But
when the day comes to turn the prisoners of the
zoo out of their cages, if it is only to lead them
to the swifter, kinder knife of the schochet, I
shall be present and rejoicing, and if any one
present thinks to suggest that it would be a
good plan to celebrate the day by shooting the
whole zoo faculty, I shall have a revolver in my
pocket and a sound eye in my head.
XXXVII
ON HEARING MOZART
The only permanent values in the world are
truth and beauty, and of these it is probable
that truth is lasting only in so far as it is a
function and manifestation of beauty a pro-
jection of feeling in terms of idea. The world
is a charnel house of dead religions. Where are
all the faiths of the middle ages, so complex and
yet so precise? But all that was essential in
the beauty of the middle ages still lives. . . .
This is the heritage of man, but not of men.
The great majority of men are not even aware
of it. Their participation in the progress of
the world, and even in the history of the world,
is infinitely remote and trivial. They live and
die, at bottom, as animals live and die. The
human race, as a race, is scarcely cognizant of
their existence; they haven't even definite num-
ber, but stand grouped together as #, the
quantity unknown . . . and not worth knowing.
86
XXXVIII
THE ROAD TO DOUBT
The first effect of what used to be called nat-
ural philosophy is to fill its devotee with won-
der at the marvels of God. This explains why
the pursuit of science, so long as it remains
superficial, is not incompatible with the most
naive sort of religious faith. But the moment
the student of the sciences passes this stage of
childlike amazement and begins to investigate
the inner workings of natural phenomena, he be-
gins to see how ineptly many of them are man-
aged, and so he tends to pass from awe of the
Creator to criticism of the Creator, and once he
has crossed that bridge he has ceased to be a
believer. One finds plenty of neighborhood
physicians, amateur botanists, high-school
physics teachers and other such quasi-scientists
in the pews on Sunday, but one never sees a
Huxley there, or a Darwin, or an Ehrlich.
XXXIX
A NEW USE FOR CHURCHES
The argument by design, it may be granted,
establishes a reasonable ground for accepting
the existence of God. It makes belief, at all
events, quite as intelligible as unbelief. But
when the theologians take their step from the
existence of God to the goodness of God they
tread upon much less firm earth. How can one
see any proof of that goodness in the senseless
and intolerable sufferings of man his helpless-
ness, the brief and troubled span of his life, the
inexplicable disproportion between his deserts
and his rewards, the tragedy of his soaring as-
piration, the worse tragedy of his dumb ques-
tioning? Granting the existence of God, a house
dedicated to Him naturally follows. He is all-
important; it is fit that man should take some
notice of Him. But why praise and flatter him
for his unspeakable cruelties? Why forget so
supinely His failures to remedy the easily rem-
ediable? Why, indeed, devote the churches ex-
clusively to worship? Why not give them over,
now and then, to justifiable indignation meet-
ings?
Perhaps men will incline to this idea later on.
It is not inconceivable, indeed, that religion will
one day cease to be a poltroonish acquiescence
and become a vigorous and insistent criticism.
If God can hear a petition, what ground is there
for holding that He would not hear a complaint ?
88
It might, indeed, please Him to find His creat-
ures grown so self-reliant and reflective. More,
it might even help Him to get through His in-
finitely complex and difficult work. Theology
has already moved toward such notions. It has
abandoned the primitive doctrine of God's arbi-
trariness and indifference, and substituted the
doctrine that He is willing, and even eager, to
hear the desires of His creatures i. e., their
private notions, born of experience, as to what
would be best for them. Why assume that those
notions would be any the less worth hearing and
heeding if they were cast in the form of criti-
cism, and even of denunciation ? Why hold that
the God who can understand and forgive even
treason could not understand and forgive re*
monstrance?
XL
THE ROOT OF RELIGION
The idea of literal truth crept into religion
relatively late: it is the invention of lawyers,
priests and cheese-mongers. The idea of mys-
tery long preceded it, and at the heart of that
idea of mystery was an idea of beauty that is,
an idea that this or that view of the celestial
and infernal process presented a satisfying pic-
ture of form, rhythm and organization. Once
this view was adopted as satisfying, its profes-
sional interpreters and their dupes sought to
reinforce it by declaring it true. The same
flow of reasoning is familiar on lower planes.
The average man does not get pleasure out of
an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks
it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
90
XLI
FREE WILL
Free will, it appears, is still a Christian dog-
ma. Without it the cruelties of God would
strain faith to the breaking-point. But outside
the fold it is gradually falling into decay. Such
men of science as George W. Crile and Jacques
Loeb have dealt it staggering blows, and among
laymen of inquiring mind it seems to be giving
way to an apologetic sort of determinism a
determinism, one may say, tempered by defec-
tive observation. The late Mark Twain, in his
secret heart, was such a determinist. In his
"What Is Man?" you will find him at his fare-
wells to libertarianism. The vast majority of
our acts, he argues, are determined, but there
remains a residuum of free choices. Here we
stand free of compulsion and face a pair or
more of alternatives, and are free to go this
way or that.
A pillow for free will to fall upon but one
loaded with disconcerting brickbats. Where the
occupants of this last trench of libertarianism
err is in their assumption that the pulls of their
antagonistic impulses are exactly equal that
the individual is absolutely free to choose which
one he will yield to. Such freedom, in practise,
is never encountered. When an individual con-
fronts alternatives, it is not alone his volition
that chooses between them, but also his environ-
ment, his inherited prejudices, his race, his
9i
color, his condition of servitude. I may kiss a
girl or I may not kiss her, but surely it would
be absurd to say that I am, in any true sense,
a free agent in the matter. The world has even
put my helplessness into a proverb. It says
tha't my decision and act depend upon the time,
the place and even to some extent, upon the
girl.
Examples might be multiplied ad infinitum. I
can scarcely remember performing a wholly vol-
untary act. My whole life, as I look back upon
it, seems to be a long series of inexplicable ac-
cidents, not only quite unavoidable, but even
quite unintelligible. Its history is the history of
the reactions of my personality to my environ-
ment, of my behavior before external stimuli.
I have been no more responsible for that per-
sonality than I have been for that environment.
To say that I can change the former by a volun-
tary effort is as ridiculous as to say that I can
modify the curvature of the lenses of my eyes. I
know, because I have often tried to change it,
and always failed. Nevertheless, it has changed.
I am not the same man I was in the last cen-
tury. But the gratifying improvements so
plainly visible are surely not to be credited to
me. All of them came from without or from
unplumbable and uncontrollable depths within.
The more the matter is examined the more the
residuum of free will shrinks and shrinks, until
in the end it is almost impossible to find it. A
great many men, of course, looking at them-
92
selves, see it as something very large ; they slap
their chests and call themselves free agents, and
demand that God reward them for their virtue.
But these fellows are simply idiotic egoists, de-
void of a critical sense. They mistake the acts
of God for their own acts. Of such sort are the
coxcombs who boast about wooing and winning
their wives. They are brothers to the fox who
boasted that he had made the hounds run. . . .
The throwing overboard of free will is com-
monly denounced on the ground that it subverts
morality and makes of religion a mocking.
Such pious objections, of course, are foreign to
logic, but nevertheless it may be well to give
a glance to this one. It is based upon the falla-
cious hypothesis that the determinist escapes,
or hopes to escape, the consequences of his acts.
Nothing could be more untrue. Consequences
follow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be
involuntary as if they be voluntary. If I rob a
bank of my free choice or in response to some
unfathomable inner necessity, it is all one; I
will go to the same jail. Conscripts in war are
killed just as often as volunteers. Men who
are tracked down and shanghaied by their
wives have just as hard a time of it as men
who walk fatuously into the trap by formally
proposing.
Even on the ghostly side, determinism does
not do much damage to theology. It is no hard-
er to believe that a man will be damned for his
involuntary acts than it is to believe that he
93
will be damned for his voluntary acts, for even
the supposition that he is wholly free does not
dispose of the massive fact that God made him
as he is, and that God could have made him a
saint if He had so desired. To deny this is to
flout omnipotence a crime at which, as I have
often said, I balk. But here I begin to fear
that I wade too far into the hot waters of the
sacred sciences, and that I had better retire be-
fore I lose my hide. This prudent retirement is
purely deterministic. I do not ascribe it to my
own sagacity ; I ascribe it wholly to that singu-
lar kindness which fate always shows me. If I
were free I'd probably keep on, and then regret
it afterward.
XLII
QUID EST VERITAS?
All great religions, in order to escape absurd-
ity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It
is only the savage, whether of the African bush
or the American gospel tent, who pretends to
know the will and intent of God exactly and
completely. "For who hath known the mind
of the Lord?" asked Paul of the Romans. "How
unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways
past finding out!" "It is the glory of God,"
said Solomon, "to conceal a thing." "Clouds
and darkness," said David, "are around him."
"No man," said the Preacher, "can find out the
work of God." . . . The difference between re-
ligions is a difference in their relative content of
agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic
faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts abso-
lutely without professing to know at all.
95
XLIII
THE DOUBTER'S REWARD
Despite the common delusion to the contrary
the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting
than that of hope. The doubter escapes the
worst penalty of the man of hope; he is never
disappointed, and hence never indignant. The
inexplicable and irremediable may interest him,
but they do not enrage him, or, I may add, fool
him. This immunity is worth all the dubious as-
surances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmati-
cally impregnable. . . . Moreover, it makes for
tolerance and sympathy. The doubter does
not hate his opponents ; he sympathizes with
them. In the end, he may even come to sympa-
thize with God. . . . The old idea of fatherhood
here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood.
God, too, is beset by limitations, difficulties,
broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of
Him thus? Well, it is any the less disconcert-
ing to think of Him as able to ease and answer,
and yet failing? . . .
But he that doubteth damnatus est. At
once the penalty of doubt and its proof, ex-
cuse and genesis.
XLIV
BEFORE THE ALTAR
A salient objection to the prevailing religious
ceremonial lies in the attitudes of abasement
that it enforces upon the faithful. A man
would be thought a slimy and knavish fellow
if he approached any human judge or potentate
in the manner provided for approaching the
Lord God. It is an etiquette that involves loss
of self-respect, and hence it cannot be pleas-
ing to its object, for one cannot think of the
Lord God as sacrificing decent feelings to mere
vanity. This notion of abasement, like most
of the other ideas that are general in the world,
is obviously the invention of small and ignoble
men. It is the pollution of theology by the
sklavmoral.
XLV
THE MASK
Ritual is to religion what the music of an
opera is to the libretto: ostensibly a means of
interpretation, but actually a means of con-
cealment. The Presbyterians made the mistake
of keeping the doctrine of infant damnation in
plain words. As enlightenment grew in the
world, intelligence and prudery revolted against
it, and so it had to be abandoned. Had it been
set to music it would have survived uncompre-
hended, unsuspected and unchallenged.
98
XLVI
PIA VENEZIANI, POI CRISTIANI
I have spoken of the possibility that God,
too, may suffer from a finite intelligence, and
so know the bitter sting of disappointment and
defeat. Here I yielded something to politeness ;
the thing is not only possible, but obvious. Like
man, God is deceived by appearances and prob-
abilities; He makes calculations that do not
work out; He falls into specious assumptions.
For example, He assumed that Adam and Eve
would obey the law in the Garden. Again, He
assumed that the appalling lesson of the Flood
would make men better. Yet again, He as-
sumed that men would always put religion in
first place among their_concerns that it would
be eternally possible to reach and influence
them through it. This last assumption was the
most erroneous of them all. The truth is that
the generality of men have long since ceased
to take religion seriously. When we encounter
one who still does so, he seems eccentric, al-
most feeble-minded or, more commonly, a
rogue who has been deluded by his own hypoc-
risy. Even men who are professionally relig-
ious, and who thus have far more incentive to
stick to religion than the rest of us, nearly
always throw it overboard at the first serious
temptation. During the past four years, for
99
example, Christianity has been in combat with
patriotism all over Christendom. Which has
prevailed? How many gentlemen of God, hav-
ing to choose between Christ and Patrie, have
actually chosen Christ?
100
XLVII
OFF AGAIN, ON AGAIN
The ostensible object of the Reformation,
which lately reached its fourth centenary, was
to purge the Church of imbecilities. That ob-
ject was accomplished; the Church shook them
off. But imbecilities make an irresistible appeal
to man; he inevitably tries to preserve them by
cloaking them with religious sanctions. The re-
sult is Protestantism.
101
XL VIII
THEOLOGY
The notion that theology is a dull subject is
one of the strangest delusions of a stupid and
uncritical age. The truth is that some of the
most engrossing books ever written in the world
are full of it. For example, the Gospel accord-
ing to St. Luke. For example, Nietzsche's
"Der Antichrist." For example, Mark Twain's
"What Is Man?", St. Augustine's Confessions,
Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe," and
Huxley's Essays. How, indeed, could a thing
be dull that has sent hundreds of thousands of
men the very best and the very worst of the
race to the gallows and the stake, and made
and broken dynasties, and inspired the greatest
of human hopes and enterprises, and embroiled
whole continents in war? No, theology is not
a soporific. The reason it so often seems so
is that its public exposition has chiefly fallen, in
these later days, into the hands of a sect of in-
tellectual castrati, who begin by mistaking it
for a sub-department of etiquette, and then
proceed to anoint it with butter, rose water and
talcum powder. Whenever a first-rate intel-
lect tackles it, as in the case of Huxley, or in
that of Leo XIII., it at once takes on all the
sinister fascination it had in Luther's day.
102
XLIX
EXEMPLI GRATIA
Do I let the poor suffer, and consign them, as
old Friedrich used to say, to statistics and the
devil? Well, so does God.
