H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/October 25, 1915

§1.

The Puritan Incentive.—The Puritan always tries to make us believe (and often he undoubtedly believes himself) that his stern rules for the conduct of the other fellow are altruistic—that he seeks the other fellow’s advantage against the latter’s will. Cf. prohibition, the laws against horse-racing, vice crusading, u. s. w. This, of course, is a delusion. The Puritan would not actually like it if the other fellow were saved, either here or hereafter. His joy in his own virtue, indeed, lies chiefly in the feeling that it gives him an advantage—that he himself will escape hell whereas the other fellow will go there. Take away hell for the other fellow and Puritanism would lose most of its meaning—and, what is more, neatly all its charm…

§2

Also, the Puritan’s joy in his own virtue is due partly to his belief that such a degree of virtue is enormously difficult to maintain—that the average man is quite incapable of it. Hence the Puritan venerates himself as an artist of unusual talents, a virtuoso of virtue. His error consists in mistaking a weakness for a merit. It is not actually a sign of merit to be virtuous (that is, in the Puritanical sense); it is merely a sign of docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice. The average Puritan, once his alleged triumphs over the flesh are forgotten, is always found to be a poor stick of a man. No truly first-rate man ever was a Puritan. No Puritan has ever written a poem worth reading, or a symphony worth hearing, or painted a picture worth looking at. Even in the department that the Puritan has marked out for his own—i. e., that of law-making—he has done only second- and third-rate work. The only genuinely valuable contributions to law that have been made in two thousand years—e.g., the Code Napoleon—have been the work of non-Puritans.

§3

“Calvinism,” said Mark Pattison, “saved Europe.” But from what? From the Renaissance.

§4.

The Cult of Law.—The rabble is always intensely moral, it always has the utmost belief in law. This explains the rise of a false sort of great man under democracy—to wit, the glorified lawyer, the soothsayer of the prevailing morality. Bryan, Wilson, the college professor, Roosevelt. A democracy, in the long run, is always controlled by lawyers who actually believe in law, or who at least profess to believe in it. The former are on all fours intellectually with magicians who believe in their own magic—e. g., Christian Scientists. . . . In all great national emergencies, of course, law worship has to be abandoned, or there is swift and irremediable disaster. Lincoln had no belief in law; in fact, he regarded all lawyers with suspicion. His weapon was physical force. Whenever, in fact, anything important is to be done, law must be conveniently forgotten. The Panama Canal business. (Even honor must be quietly shelved. Roosevelt and the treaty with Columbia.)

§5.

On Moral Beauty.—The phrase “moral beauty,” despite the respectable authorities for its use, is really wholly meaningless. A thing cannot be both moral and beautiful, for the essence of morality is renunciation and the essence of beauty is enjoyment. As well speak of “self-sacrificing self-indulgence.” There is, of course, such a thing as moral voluptuousness—one observes it, indeed, in all Puritans—but no long exposition is needed to demonstrate that it is related to morality in name only. The Puritan shows his moral voluptuousness, not in the rules of conduct he imposes upon himself, but in the rules of conduct he imposes upon the other fellow. In this business he plays the artist rather than the moralist, for the satisfaction he seeks is not so much that of having refrained from something pleasant as that of having achieved something pleasant—namely, the military conquest of the other fellow. . .

But in general the Puritan is a man whose æsthetic feeling is very feeble. Even in the case we have been considering it shows itself in the primitive form of cruelty, an element not lacking, true enough, in the higher manifestations of the æsthetic spirit, for they all involve the satisfaction of the will to power by forcing recalcitrant agencies to submit to design, but still an element that is usually well concealed by other and more rarefied factors. The Puritan can never imagine beauty as a thing in itself, an end in itself. Even music, the purest form of beauty, he apprehends only as a sort of uproarious reinforcement of moral precepts—a rhythmic hammering, as it were, upon the conscience.

§6.

Another Illusion.—The notion that the Puritan is more virtuous than the other fellow is an illusion produced by the fact that the Puritan, by having control of law-making in the Anglo-Saxon countries for 300 years, has managed to make crimes of most of the acts agreeable to the other fellow, while allowing a full legality to most of the acts agreeable to himself. In themselves, many characteristic Puritan acts are far more dangerous to civilized order and decency than the characteristic acts of such favorite butts of Puritan attack as gamblers, saloonkeepers and even prostitutes. If the Puritan laws prevailing in the average American city were suddenly repealed and the code of any European country—e. g., France, Italy, Russia or Germany—were substituted for them, fully a half of the persons under indictment for misdemeanors would be liberated, and a good many popular moralists and examples-to-the-young would be jailed. . . . In France, for example, it would be quite impossible for a group of smutty old boys to form a private organization for spying upon the private acts of their fellow-citizens: the police would quickly suppress the verein. In Italy or Russia, such a clown as the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday would be jugged as a public nuisance. And in Germany the average Sunday-school cornetist, bruising the tympani of honest folk on Sunday mornings, would be condemned to the chain-gang…

§7.

Morality, like its antithesis, the love of beauty, is an intensely jealous mistress. It tries to dominate and monopolize all situations. Thus, the Puritan feels that he is immoral when, for a single moment, he forgets morality—i. e., when he acts naturally and honestly, instead of according to his painful, artificial rules. All works of art seem immoral to a Puritan for this reason: they make him forget, in spite of himself, that he is moral, even that such a thing as morality exists. So viewed, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is quite immoral. It teaches nothing. It imposes nothing. It makes one regret nothing. The Puritan conscience, feeling this instinctively, has tried to make it moral by reading moral messages into it—by making it either triumphant battle music or the clergy of a conqueror. Beethoven himself, tainted by the puerile moralizing of post-Reformation Germany, himself gave color and credit to this damphoolishness. . . . But one recalls with a snicker that he could never quite make up his mind just what it meant. Once it was one thing and then another.

§8.

A Definition.—One may define Puritanism quite briefly, and yet fully. It is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99.9 per cent. of them are wrong.

§9.

Note the first part of the definition: that every act must be either right or wrong. This is almost the whole story. A Puritan is simply one who is haunted by moral ideas, a man beset and tortured by the hosts of conscience. He cannot imagine a human act that is morally inert. Even such purely biological phenomena as eating, drinking and walking take on moral significances in his sin-stuffed head. It is not only foolish to eat too much, but also a sin. The man who drinks ale with his chop will go to hell. There should be a law against taking walks on the Sabbath.

§10.

Twins.—At the bottom of Puritanism one always finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is the cause of a fact commonly observed: that the Puritan is usually a democrat, and vice versa.

§11.

The Revival of Wrath.—All the historians of Puritanism call attention to its dependency upon the Old Testament. Its effect in Europe, in truth, was to revive the Old Testament, and in particular the Old Testament Jahveh, the God of Wrath. The whole spirit of Puritanism was and is in direct conflict with the New Testament. The very ministry of Christ was a crusade against the Puritans of His time—i. e., the Pharisees. His memorable description and denunciation of them, recorded in Matthew, xxiii, fits the modern Puritans without the change of a word. It is, therefore, no wonder that the Puritans, in their efforts to make Christianity better (that is, more cruel, more satisfying) do not hesitate to throw Christ overboard. Their discussions of the miracle at Cana. Their attitude toward sinners in general, and the scarlet woman in particular.

§12.

American Puritanism.—One of the most ludicrous errors prevailing in the United States is the notion that American Puritanism is an exclusively New England product. The truth is, of course, that the worst Puritans of the day are in the South and the Middle West (not forgetting a polite bow to the Pacific Coast). . . . One hears much gabble about the Cavalier spirit in various Southern states—e. g., Virginia. The truth is that very few actual Cavaliers ever settled in the colonies, and that the few who did come never got out of sight of tidewater. The Puritans seized Virginia, kicking out Governor Berkeley at the same time that they seized England, chopping off the head of Charles I. The Church of England, in Virginia, has always been extremely low church. . . . Today it would be difficult to name a single man of Cavalier origin and tradition—i.e., a gentleman by ancestry—who is in public life in Virginia. The Commonwealth has been seized by the rabble, which is always puritanical. Imagine George Washington voting for prohibition!

§13.

One of the curious flowers of Puritanism is the circus-horse preacher, the prima donna evangelist. . . . An evangelist is a ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven. . . .

§14.

The worst foe of Puritanism is the practical joking of the gods. . . . Who ever heard of a Puritan who could resist a pretty woman?

§15.

Sunday-school: The first refuge of scoundrels.

§16

. . . . . Puritanism . . . . a scheme for climbing into Heaven on the bare backs of sinners.

§17.

Puritanism will remain impregnable so long as democracy prevails, but the moment the latter yields to environmental pressure it will go to pieces. Meanwhile, the more plainly Puritanism can be hooked up with obvious extravagance and imbecility—that is, the more plainly it can be demonstrated that the mental processes of its great prophets and gladiators are identical with those of cornfield negroes—the easier will be the business of hatcheting it when its time comes. It is the capital merit of Dr. Sunday, et al., that they make this identity unmistakable and undeniable. Once Sunday has “saved” a city, its understanding of the Puritan theories for which he stands is vastly more accurate than before. The anthropoid majority of such a city may continue whooping for him, and for the puerile pulpiteers who attempt feeble imitations of him, but the civilized minority have been made aware of the precise nature of his balderdash, and awakened to the menace it presents to civilized, orderly, efficient and honest government.