Second Mencken Chrestomathy (61 page)

From the
American Mercury
, May, 1930, pp. 125–27.
A review of H
UMANISM
& A
MERICA
: E
SSAYS ON THE
O
UTLOOK OF
M
ODERN
C
IVILIZATION
, edited by Norman Foerster; New York, 1930

This collection of essays is a manifesto for a movement called, by its proponents, Humanism, which, so Dr. Foerster says in his preface, “is rapidly becoming a word to conjure with.”
^*
It is not, it appears, a new movement, but goes back, like Freemasonry, to a remote and hoary antiquity, and has been supported, at one time or another, “by persons as various as Homer, Phidias, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe; more recently, by Matthew Arnold in England and Emerson and Lowell in America.” But at the moment, lacking any such whales, it is in the hands of a group of American pedagogues, of whom the imperial wizard is Prof. Irving
Babbitt of Harvard, the grand goblin Prof. Paul Elmer More of Princeton, and the supreme sinister kligraph Prof. Foerster himself. The present pronunciamento embraces fifteen essays, three of them by the learned men I have just named and the rest by various lesser initiates, including eight more professors, an advanced poet, two college boys, and the author of “Waldo Frank: A Study.”

In so large a collection there is necessarily some difference of opinion, both as to what is wrong with the world and what ought to be done about it. Prof. More seems to be most disturbed by Dr. A. F. Whitehead’s somewhat ribald speculations about the nature of God and by the transcendental prose printed in the magazine called
transition
. His brother, Prof. Louis Trenchard More, denounces Whitehead too, but is also against Einstein and Planck, not to mention John B. Watson. Prof. G. R. Elliott of Amherst rages against “softening God’s laws” and pleads for “a rediscovery of their severity”: he believes that “the two most potent and distinguished personalities … that have so far appeared in the English literature of the Twentieth Century” are the late Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Prof. Babbitt. Prof. Thompson prints an earnest essay on the nature of tragedy: it would get him an A in any course in Freshman English. Prof. Robert Shafer of the University of Cincinnati compares Dreiser to Aeschylus and proves that Aeschylus was the better when it came to asserting “his faith that Moral Law uncompromisingly governs the life of man.” Prof. Harry H. Clark of Wisconsin shows that the only recent American novel worth a hoot is Dorothy Canfield’s “The Brimming Cup,” and argues that the only way to get better ones is for “our interpreters of literature in college and university” to put their heads together, and show the boys “the unerring congruency to human nature demanded of great art.” And so on down to Mr. Gorham B. Munson, author of the monograph on Waldo Frank, who first shows that criticism is in a sad state in America, and then “takes the risk”—his own words—“of nominating Matthew Arnold as having the build of a great critic.” Alas, Mr. Munson is modest.

All this, I fear, will strike the reader of these lines as mainly rubbish, and that, in truth, is what it is. The only contributors to the volume who go to the trouble of stating plainly what Humanism is are Dr. Foerster and Prof. Babbitt. Dr. Babbitt, who has been in
the movement for years, says that it represents an effort to set up a criterion of values which “the phenomenal world does not supply”—in other words, to add intuition to experience. The trouble with such a fellow, say, as Dreiser, is that he simply describes the world as he sees it, and lets it go at that. Ask him what meaning there is in the story of Jennie Gerhardt and he tells you that he doesn’t know. Dr. Babbitt believes that, at least for many men, this is insufficient. They want some assurance, some certainty, some answer to the riddle. As for Dr. Babbitt himself, he believes that it is to be found in “religious insight.” “For my own part,” he says, “I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the supernatural.” And he believes that it would be a good thing to round up all persons who think the same way, that they may “move toward a communion” and become “an element of social order and stability.” Dr. Foerster inclines the same way. He believes that man lives “on three planes, the natural, the human and the religious,” and that Humanism “should be confined to a working philosophy seeking to make a resolute distinction between man and nature and between man and the divine.”

In all this, of course, there is nothing new, though I fear Dr. Foerster is going beyond the facts when he says that Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe believe it. The same thing precisely has been preached in all the Little Bethels of the world since the invention of original sin, and is even today the theme of nine evangelical sermons out of ten—that is, when they deal with religion at all. More, it is at the bottom of all the secular schemes for getting rid of uncomfortable realities by conjuring up something grander and gaudier—for example, Rotarianism. George F. Babbitt, in fact, was quite as sound a Humanist as Dr. Foerster: he too yearned and panted for a sweet and simple arcanum and could see something divine in a bank cashier, or even a lawyer. Nor is it hard to understand why the Humanist theology should appeal powerfully to young college instructors, and to the colicky sophomores who admire them. It is the natural and inevitable refuge of all timorous and third-rate men—of all weaklings for whom the struggle with hard facts is unendurable—of all the nay-sayers of Nietzsche’s immortal scorn. The hot sun is too much for them; they want an asylum that is reassuringly dark and damp, with
incense burning and the organ playing soft and delicate hymns.

The demand for that asylum is couched in mellifluous terms, but it remains nonsense. The progress of the human race is not forwarded by any such vague and witless blather. It is forwarded by extending the range of man’s positive knowledge, by grappling resolutely with facts, by facing life, not like a school-ma’am, but like a man. With that business the finishers of bond salesmen have no more to do today than their melancholy predecessors had to do in the past. It is the enterprise of far better men—most of them, though they may not always know it, creative artists. It is an enterprise demanding the highest capacities of mankind, and so it is naturally not comprehensible to campus Pollyannas.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, July 25, 1931

Ever and anon another so-called radical professor is heaved out of a State university, always to the tune of bitter protests in the liberal weeklies. The usual defense of the trustees is that the doctrines he teaches are dangerous to the young. This puts him on all fours with Socrates—surely a somewhat large order. The real objection to his ideas, nine times out of ten, is that only idiots believe such things. But that objection has to be kept quiet, for it is saying nothing apposite against a professor in the average State university to prove that he is an idiot.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
OURTH
S
ERIES
, 1924, p. 198

Between a speech by a Salvation Army convert, a Southern Congressman, or a Grand Goblin of the Rotary Club and a treatise by an American professor of philosophy there is no more to choose than between the puling of an infant and the puling of an
ancient veteran of the wars. Both show the human cerebrum loaded far beyond its Plimsoll mark; both, strictly speaking, are idiotic.

From D
AMN
! A B
OOK OF
C
ALUMNY
, 1918, p. 13

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 rubber-stamp upon Mark Twain.

From D
AMN
! A B
OOK OF
C
ALUMNY
, 1918, pp. 75–79

T
HE NOTION
that the aim of art is to fix the shifting aspects of nature, that all art is primarily representative—this notion is as unsound as the theory that Friday is an unlucky day, and is dying as hard. The true function of art is to criticise, embellish and edit nature—particularly 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 soprano. 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
katzenjammer
—and one is enough. Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and larynxes will 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 ingenuity had been lavished upon music machines as has been lavished upon the telephone and the steam engine, we would have had mechanical orchestras long ago.

When the human performer of music thus goes the way of the galley-slave, the charm of personality, of course, will be pumped
out of the performance of music. But the charm of personality does not help music; it hinders it. It is not a reënforcement; 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 because of the sex interest, and to the women because of the professional or technical interest—and so music is forced into the background. What it becomes, indeed, is no more than a half-heard accompaniment to an imagined anecdote.

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 disregarding 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
héliogabalisme.
A soprano who can gargle her way up to G sharp in altissimo interests it almost as much as a contralto who has slept publicly 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 saying 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 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, depends upon the other: without some definite notion 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 Sunday-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. But all art, to the yahoo, must have a certain
bawdiness in it, 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. Condescending to the concert hall, he is bored by the posse of 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 intrigue.

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, “Josefslegende,” is an attempt to write an opera without singers. All of the music is in the orchestra; 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 Joseph 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. The end, perhaps, will be music purged of its current ptomaines. In brief, music.