H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/February 17, 1916

§1.

Mencken, hater of shams, tearer-down of flimsy sentimentality, rough, fearless mind. An English gentleman subscribing himself “John Bull” favors me with a clipping of a letter he recently published in the Evening Sunpaper expressing interest in the coming visit of Dr. Sunday on the ground that “it promises a run-in between the evangelist and Mencken of the Free Lance.” I extract shamelessly a few oleaginous strophes:

Here we have an institution, but there is the man, always ready to encourage and humor his associates. . . . A member of the Ministerial Perunion told me that there was no good in Mencken. I had observed the minister, his life and work, and I had observed Mencken the institution and Mr. Mencken the man, and found much good wherever I looked.

These fair words, coming from an Englishman, leave me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, such sweetness across the bloody chasm naturally intrigues my vanity, but on the other hand I am committed to the doctrine that an Englishman is necessarily devoid of discretion and intelligence. Perhaps the solution that offers the most comfort is a revision of that doctrine. I change it so as to read that a minority of Englishmen, by contact with men of superior races, have acquired an imitative cunning which may well pass for discernment, and then add the free corollary that the worst Englishman is still measurably superior to the worst American. . . .

§2.

So much for the amenities. As for the hon. gentleman’s hope that I shall presently fling myself upon Dr. Sunday for the diversion of the groundlings, I tell him at once that I shall do nothing of the sort. I did not launch the campaign which will bring the doctor here for the purpose of harassing him inhospitably and indecently, but for the purpose of supplying myself with an abundance of clinical material for the study of the emotions, superstitions and processes of ratiocination of the mob, to which science I have devoted many years. Such a performance as he stages should be as profitable to the student of mob psychology as a polluted drinking supply is to the student of internal medicine. It offers an almost unlimited stock of materials of diverse and incomparable interest. No imaginable phenomenon of sub-cerebral fermentation, no conceivable symptom of psychical shock, will be missing. It will be a vivisection on a colossal scale, and the admission will be free.

As for Dr. Sunday’s specific doctrines, I am not greatly interested in them: the only important thing is the process whereby he emits and implants them. So far as I can understand them at all, his ideas seem to be no worse than those of other popular theologians, nor is his hortatory style, qua style, appreciably more vulgar. His alleged vulgarity, indeed, is a necessary part of him, even if he privately laments it, and he could not exist without it, for he makes his appeal, not to reflective and judicious persons, but to the mob, and the mob can understand only its own language. His most effective arguments, put into careful phrases and well-rounded periods, might just as well be put into Latin. Newspapers labor under the same difficulty: they must argue emotionally and idiotically if they would stir up the animals at all. The only newspapers that even pretend to intelligence are confessedly of small circulation. By the same token the only politicians who are admitted to be sensible, or even honest, are failures at getting votes. . . .

§3.

Those gentlemen who venture to attack Dr. Sunday’s theology tread upon dangerous ground, for most of the best arguments against it are also arguments against all other forms of religion—i. e., against all forms of religion comprehensible to and believed in by the mob. I have read a good many of his sermons carefully, and I find nothing in them regarding either the routes to salvation or its ultimate usufructs that many persons of genuine faith would dispute. All he says is that it is better and safer to believe than not to believe, that the righteous man will have a better chance hereafter than the loose liver, that it is the duty of a Christian to belong to some definite church and to help pay for its upkeep, that without faith the paths of virtue are difficult. Who, professing to be a Christian, will deny any of these propositions? As a matter of fact, they are enunciated from hundreds of Baltimore pulpits every Sunday, and nine Baltimoreans out of ten, whether in the church or out of it, have confidence in their essential truth. To blame a man for voicing such stale platitudes, however raucously, is to flirt with heresy and risk a knock in the head.

Even Dr. Sunday’s naif demonology is by no means his private copyright: on the contrary, it is the common possession of Christendom. Is it a crime to believe in a devil who walks abroad in search of victims, and in a hell that spouts incandescent tongues of authentic phosphorus, manganese and radium? Then the vast majority of Christians, clerical and lay, deserve 30 days at Jessuos Cat. All that Dr. Sunday does is to make hell and devil more vivid—i. e., more real—to men of defective imagination, who cannot encompass the thing unaided. They go into his tabernacle thinking of the devil as they think of death—that is, as something infinitely remote and theoretical, whose menace need not concern them. They come out seeing the devil as brilliantly as a rat sees a cat, and feeling the red claws of the old fellow at their throats.

With what result? With the result that they grew fearful and prudent. With the result that they stop sinning the sins that are publicly denounced and forbidden, and find a vent for their native cussedness in malefactions of a more subtle, surreptitious and seemly sort. The fact that the devil has been made visible to them makes them treat him as if he were actually present, like, say, a policeman. They try to steer clear of him, first by giving over the more open sort of invitations to his notice, and, secondly, by perfecting their technical skill at concealing the more furtive kind. . . . This explains the peculiar morals of Sunday-school superintendents and such- like consecrated fauna. Superficially they are good and subterraneously they are careful. The result is a public assumption of their goodness all the way down, and a gasp of surprise, quickly translated into a wallop of ire, when it is fortuitously discovered that they are sinners, at bottom, like the rest of us.

§4.

I speak here without passion, for by the Sundayan theology I myself am definitely lost, and in that view I acquiesce with as good a grace as I can muster. If Dr. Sunday is right in his contentions, if it is true that there is a hell after this life and that no man can escape it save by accepting certain specific ideas as true, then I am probably in for a fearful roasting, for some of these ideas seem to me to be at variance with unescapable facts and others are of such a character that I cannot come to any satisfactory conclusion about them at all. My difficulty, of course, lies in the fact that I consider them and try to estimate them without emotion, that I apply to them the same dispassionate judgment that a man might apply to a business situation in poker, or the gabble of his wife. Here is a temperamental defect, an incapacity for certain sorts of emotion, and, as I have said, I shall probably have to go to hell for it.

Many other men, in varying measure, have the same defect. It is the aim of Dr. Sunday and of all other such exhorters to overcome it by arousing their dormant emotions—to swamp their critical faculties in a flood of feeling, usually of fear. In the case of the lower orders of men this is relatively easy, for most of their business in the world is done by emotion anyhow, but in the case of men who are ashamed of emotion and habitually fight it off the thing is very difficult. This explains why Dr. Sunday recruits thousands from the barrel-houses, but very few from the barrooms of the leading hotels. The latter, if they are ever to be saved at all, must be tackled with more powerful weapons, that their hard shells of doubt may be cracked. I suggest drugs, and particularly opium. The plan has never been tried. It promises, at all events, interesting results.

§5.

As for the grosser practical effects of the learned doctor’s coming jehad I can see nothing in them to cause alarm. The fact that thousands of citizens of Baltimore are donkeys will be made more visible, but the fact itself will not be new, nor even, for that matter, of any importance. Maryland, perhaps, will go dry, but Maryland is pretty sure to go  dry anyhow—and those who will suffer have ample time to prepare. A few more crazy “moral” laws will be put upon the statute books; a few more Savonarolas in F sharp minor will emerge from the Ministerial Perunion; a few more prehensile Ioakanaans will posture and slobber before the City Club; the phonographs of the town will turn from “My Little Gray Home in the West” to “Brighten the Corner Where You Are”; the newspapers will put on white chokers and take to quoting the New Testament in their editorials; it will be easier, for a while, to raise money for the heathen; candidates for public office will pass the plate in church. But all these differences will be in quantity only, not in quality. The essential hypocrisy of our dear old town will not be appreciably augmented; on the contrary, its more copious manifestation will probably be counterbalanced by a very real increase in rectitude, or, at all events, in the effort toward rectitude. I myself shall very likely gain something, if only a greater feeling of self-satisfaction, a renewed gladness that I am not as certain other men are, a multiplication of my native snobbery. It will be a vast pleasure to pass a galvanized iron chapel with muslin banners fluttering and melodeon snorting and rev. gentlemen whooping and sweating, and to cherish the sweet thought that I am still safely sinful, that parology hath not touched me, that my emotional withers are unwrung. Those of us who escape, indeed, will be even happier than those who are snared. We shall be in the position of soldiers who have faced a devastating fire and yet gone unscathed. . . . I am already thinking of organizing a Survivors’ Corps, and of proposing that it give a public dinner to Lieutenant Berge. . . .

§6.

In such a forthright and picturesque fellow as Dr. Sunday there is always something irresistibly attractive. He belongs to a high order of humanity; he is extraordinarily shrewd and competent; he has done with vast success what multitudes of other men, most of them endlessly earnest and energetic, have tried to do in vain. The objection to him, if any is raised at all, should not come from the unregenerate, but from his beaten rivals, the evangelical clergy. Hundreds of such diligent gentlemen of God have been at work in Baltimore for years, and they have brought to their business every art of the enthusiast. They have stormed like Luther, cajoled like Cagliostro, argued like Loyola, flirted and smirked like Sarah Bernhardt, out-hocused the hocus- pocus of Barnum. They have tried terror, persuasion, audacity, sweet seduction, mere noise. The town has been deafened by their laryngeal sforzandos, blinded by the flashing of their eyes, shaken in its boots by their fearful skyrockets, pinwheels and stinkpots. They have fought the good fight with whoops, roars, discharges of artillery, lyric poetry, moving pictures, fried oysters, politics, ptomaines, syllogisms, cornets, raffles, acrobatics, courting parlors, basketball, cowbells, calliopes, bull-fiddles, harps, psalteries, canards, roorbacks, machine guns, ice-cream, strawberries, cold slaw, low comedy, legerdemain, banjos, bass drums, boxing, high jumping, gospel wagons, glockenspiels, chautauquas, choirs, anathemas, pipe organs, socialism, perunas, clubs, horsewhips and the gospels according to SS. Mark, Luke, Matthew and John. . . . And in the end they are licked! In the end they are forced to call in one man to do what the whole camorra of them has failed to do! . . .

§7.

Surprising? Disgraceful? Not at all. These clerics of the common or garden variety have done their level darndest, and deserve full credit for it. They have fallen down simply because the job before them has been one for an extraordinary man, for a first-rate man, for a Napoleon, a Beethoven, a Hindenburg. One such man is not only worth a thousand men; he is worth any conceivable number of lesser men; he is worth all of them that you can muster put together. . . . As for me, I naturally lament that a man as efficient as Dr. Sunday has consecrated his great talents to so puerile a business as the crazing of the vulgar—but every man to his own poison! To be a mere evangelist is to be no more than a tiresome and futile nuisance, but to be a good evangelist, to be a master evangelist, is to be Somebody. . .