Second Mencken Chrestomathy (70 page)

On the secular side he had got through almost everything written for the cello. For twenty-five years he went to the late Frederick H. Gottlieb’s house every Sunday night to engage in chamber music, and for even longer he played with the Saturday Night Club, of which he was a charter member. Nor was this all, for he put in many evenings playing with his wife, his daughter and his sister-in-law, and in his earlier days there were weeks when he made music every night. He was always ready to drop everything for a session with his cello. Once, years ago, I happened into his place one afternoon when a German exchange student was calling on him. The German allowed that he was a fiddler, and Al suggested a couple of trios. We played from 4 to 6:30, went out to dinner, returned at 7:30, and kept on until 11. Another time he was a party to a desperate scheme to play the first eight Beethoven symphonies
seriatim.
We began late one afternoon, and figured that, allowing for three suppers, one breakfast, one lunch, and five pauses for wind and beer, the job would take 24 hours. But we blew up before we got to the end of the Eroica.

The headline that I have put on these lines indicates that this was a happy man. I believe that, in all my days, I have never known a happier. There were some people he disliked, and in discussing them he was capable of a blistering invective, but on the whole he was too good-humored to have enemies, and he got on well even with musicians, who are sometimes very difficult. He was a bachelor for many years, but was always quartered with friends, and so had a comfortable home. He made a good living, spent his money freely, had a civilized taste for sound eating and drinking, and never tired of music for an instant. When he married, relatively late in life, his luck remained with him, and he was presently the center of a charming family circle, with a little daughter whose precocious talent gave him great delight. He had a long and trying illness, but he was nursed with singular devotion and his doctor was an old and valued friend—and, I hope I need not add, a fiddler too. He faced death calmly, and slipped into oblivion at last with simple courage and no foolish regrets.

Such a man, it seems to me, comes very close to the Aristotelian ideal of the good citizen and the high-minded man. There was no pretension in him, but his merits were solid and enduring. He possessed a kind of knowledge that was not common, and it was very useful. He treated his clients with great scrupulosity, and his professional reputation, unchallenged for many years, went far beyond the bounds of Baltimore. He was so unfailingly kindly, so thoroughly square and decent, so completely lovable that the whole world that he knew was filled with his friends. Most of his leisure, in his later days, was spent with men he had played with, musically and otherwise, for twenty, thirty and even forty years. The old-timers all stuck to him, and there were always youngsters coming in, to learn him and to love him. Save when illness made a prisoner of him he saw them constantly, and even as he lay dying he knew that he was in their daily thoughts, and would never pass out of their memories.

They drop off one by one—Sam Hamburger, Phil Green, John Wade, Carl Schon, Henry Flood, Fred Colston, Charlie Bochau, and now Al Hildebrandt. These were pleasant fellows, one and all. The common bond between them was their love of music, and I suppose there is no better to be found. Certainly there can be
none that makes life more genuinely cheerful and contented. Most of the men I have named were amateurs, and some were only listeners, but they had in common that amiable weakness for the squeaks of the fiddle and the burbles of the flute, and it kept them together for long years. They clustered around Al Hildebrandt. He was, in his way, the best friend of every one of them, and he remains the best friend of many who still live.

Mourning him would be rather silly. He died too soon, but so do we all. The universe is run idiotically, and its only certain product is sorrow. But there are yet men who, by their generally pleasant spirits, by their intense and enlightened interest in what they have to do, by their simple dignity and decency, by their extraordinary capacity for making and keeping friends, yet manage to cheat, in some measure, the common destiny of mankind, doomed like the beasts to perish. Such a man was Albert Hildebrandt. It was a great privilege to be among his intimates; he radiated a sound and stimulating philosophy, and it was contagious. In all my days I have known no other who might have taken to himself with more reason the words of the ancient poet: “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

From D
AMN
! A B
OOK OF
C
ALUMNY
, 1918, pp. 71–72.
First printed in the
Smart Set,
Jan., 1917, pp. 271–72

I
F
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 respectable 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 telling them authoritatively what to expect and hope for; its actual effect during nineteen hundred years has been to split them into a multitude of camps, and so set them to denouncing, damning, jailing and murdering one another. Again, consider the autobiography of Benvenuto 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 terrible piece of cynicism; it survives as a story-book for sucklings. Yet again, there is “Hamlet.” 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 Romans; its sole use today is to stupefy and sicken schoolboys. The list might be lengthened almost ad
infinitum.
When a man writes a book he fires a machine-gun into a wood. The game he brings down often astonishes him, and sometimes horrifies him. Consider the case of Ibsen.… After my book on Nietzsche I was actually invited to lecture at Princeton.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
OURTH
S
ERIES
, 1924, pp. 106–07

The world has very little sense of humor. It is always wagging its ears solemnly over elaborate jocosities. For 600 years it has gurgled over the “Divine Comedy” of Dante, despite the plain fact that the work is a flaming satire upon the whole Christian hocus-pocus of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell. To have tackled such nonsense head-on, in Dante’s time, would have been to flout the hangman; hence the poet clothed his attack in an irony so delicate that the ecclesiastical police were baffled. Why is the poem called a comedy? I have read at least a dozen discussions of the question by modern pedants, all of them labored and unconvincing. The same problem obviously engaged the scholars of the poet’s own time. He called the thing simply “comedy”; they added the adjective “divine” in order to ameliorate what seemed to them to be an intolerable ribaldry. Well, here is a “comedy” in which human beings are torn limb from limb, boiled in sulphur, cut up with red-hot knives, and filled with molten lead. Can one imagine a man capable of such a magnificent poem regarding such fiendish imbecilities seriously? Certainly not. They appeared just as idiotic to him as they appear to you or me.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Feb. 11, 1910

Many vain tears are wasted upon the fat man. He is supposed to suffer from an appalling shortness of breath, and his florid complexion is ascribed to painful disorders of the circulation. The cartoonists picture him as being reduced to a sort of oily lava in Summer and as coming down upon the lee in Winter with sickening thuds and to the accompaniment of world-wide seismic disturbances.
In plays he is always the target of slap-stick and seltzer siphon, but a note of pity appears in every laugh he raises. People are sincerely sorry for him, and are prone to dwell, with maudlin sentimentality, upon the fact that no sane woman ever falls in love with a fat man.

Squandered sympathy! Wasted tears! The fat man, far from asking for them, cannot even understand them. To him the most beautiful thing in nature—the one thing, indeed, that convinces him of the essential benignity of the cosmic process—is the fact that he is fat. The fatter he gets the happier he grows. With every increase in his diameter there comes an access of comfort, of ease, of geniality, of contentment. Forced by a kind nature to give over violent physical exercise, he devotes himself to poetry, piano-playing, mathematics, philosophy, and other elevating divertissements. He is a hearty and discriminating eater and has time to make acquaintance with all the more rare and delightful victuals. He sleeps soundly and snores in the safe and sane key of C major. Excused, by public opinion, from all sartorial display, he is able to clothe himself in loose and comfortable garments. A happy man, taking his ease in his inn!

The fact that sentimental women abhor the man of bulk is not a curse laid upon him, but a stroke of good fortune. As he fares through the world, radiating joy like some soothing emanation, his footsteps are not dogged by matchmaking mammas and debutantes of prehistoric vintages. No one lures him into dim-lit parlors. No one would think of inviting him to sit in a hammock or to row a boat. He is not a dancing man; he does not excel at tennis; long walks down Lovers’ Lane fatigue his feet. So the girls leave him to his exquisite reveries and sublime contemplations, and he goes through life unhunted, unharassed and unwed, growing fatter day by day and gaining happiness with every ounce, pound and ton.

Thus he lives and dies, a being to be envied. To beauty, true enough, he cannot pretend, but in that virtue which proceeds from high thinking and that peace of mind which grows out of independence, public respect and efficiency—in these things he leads all other sentient creatures.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, April 1, 1929

In the decaying neighborhood where I live Sunday afternoon is ordinarily very quiet. Such of the people as are pious seem to take religion very heavily. Thus their morning devotions exhaust them, and after the midday meal they are fit only for snoozing. The rest, I suspect, give over Sunday afternoons to home brewing: there is a pleasant smell of malt and hops in the air, and now and then a whiff of something stronger. Not many seem to have automobiles, and I am glad to be able to add that phonographs, automatic pianos, radio loud-speakers, and other such abominations are not common. Thus the second semester of the Sabbath is generally quiet, and I devote it to work.

But last Sunday this work got itself interrupted, for there was a great commotion in the square opposite my house. The first sign of it was a series of bugle blasts, followed by vague shouts and murmurs. Going to the window, I found that the Salvation Army had taken possession of the square. Apparently it had come in force, for I counted at least fifty brothers and sisters in uniform, and with them they had a band. They also had a photographer with a huge camera, a dozen or more little girls in a sort of scout uniform, and an odd brother who wore what appeared to be the war-time livery of the Y.M.C.A. In front of the square, and directly before my house, were three Salvation Army trucks. Presently half a dozen of the brethren stripped off their coats and began unloading the trucks. First they threw out five or six contraptions not unlike carpenters’ trestles, but larger. There followed as many heavy boards cut in zigzags, like the risers of cellar steps. And then came fifteen or twenty long planks of pine, planed but not otherwise cut. It took a great deal of whooping and gesticulating to get these things out of the trucks. At least four brothers grabbed every plank, and by the time they had hoisted it over the side of the truck and dropped it on the sidewalk they had muffed it two or three times and one or another of them had got a clout from it. It was a warm day, and
they sweated freely. For each one who actually touched a plank there were three or four to boss him.

Meanwhile, a big crowd had begun to collect, mainly children from the nearby streets, and my neighbors forsook their bottling to hang out of their windows and watch. It soon appeared that the planks and trestles constituted the flesh and bones of a sort of grandstand that was to be erected on the lawn of the square, under two big trees. First the trestles were set up fifty or sixty feet from the sidewalk, and then a dignitary in uniform rushed up and ordered them taken nearer. Then it appeared that they were too far apart, and he ordered them put closer. Then they were too close, and he ordered them spread a bit. All this was done to the tune of a vast chattering and whooping. The members of the band, lolling under the trees, their instruments under their arms, took no part in putting up the grandstand: apparently they were excused, as artists, from such labor. But all the other Salvationists, at least those who were male, gave aid, and every one of them shouted orders to the others. Finally the trestles were got in place, the zigzag boards were laid against them, and the long planks were deposited upon the zigzags. The grandstand now began to reveal itself, and a couple of small boys were swinging their legs from the top plank before the lowermost one was in place. All the while the shouting and scurrying about went on, and now and then a cornetist in the band tooted an encouraging blast.