Places and Persons

...Mencken is inclined to believe that poetry, after all, is only a minor art, if God and His religion, and His priests, and the human happiness caused by religion, are to go, why not let poetry drop into the void together with them...

...The prayer was suffered to proceed...

...Mencken meant to write...

...Well, that book has sold by the millions of copies...

...Candles will burn before the shrine where he will lay embalmed...

...and then there was protoplasm, and tadpoles, and the god of evolution only knows what other intermediate forms...

...or, as if a color-blind man should strive to express the essential meaning of Giotto, Rembrandt, El Greco and Valesquez...

...which he explains by saying that they were "cautious," and feared to "oppose custom in religious observance...

...Mencken's mind thrusts the pale phantom of the scientist away from the throttle of this war tank charging against the gods...

...Praise him for that in all the gates, and by the hearths, of home!tes, and by the hearths, of home...

...But instantly he grows stern again...

...Mencken does not explain...

...Yet, in some parts of his book, Mr...

...Mencken with painful precision...

...Then a rumor reached me that the new book would be about religion, and at once I reread my article on Mr...

...Mencken's private revelation of the chemically pure and only reliable doctrine of the gods on some anonymous ironist in Mr...

...He loves his native Baltimore (as why should he not love that charming, romantic and free city, founded by the Catholic gentleman, George Calvert, Baron Baltimore...

...Mencken.* And I feel like the pious fisherman who angled on Sunday and who prayed for at least one bite, and hooked the sea serpent, and nearly died of fright...

...I hoped it would be a book that would place a needed foundation beneath his varied and voluminous work: a book of Mr...

...Mencken speaks, is at last seeing through its fradulent nature: but...

...All the rest of mankind are boobs, manipulated by the priests, for the benefit of the latter: for the sake of money, or an easy life, or power over the boobs...

...Abolish happiness...

...I am indebted to him for many a stirring ten minutes or so when I have read some article from his vigorous pen which applied the lash of his stinging style to some political or clerical expert in mumbo-jumbo...

...Mencken it really does not matter...

...This was not due to any grudge of mine against H. L. M. Quite the contrary...

...And how exhilarating is good band music, especially when the band plays war music...

...The thoroughgoing sceptics, on the other hand, in ancient times as in modern, have a thin time of it, and are themselves inevitably third or fourth raters in the hierarchy of human genius...

...Yet, with that admirable and characteristic honesty which belongs to H. L. M., in the concluding chapter of his new gospel he faces a few facts which are disagreeable to him, yet which, being facts, he candidly deals with...

...Mencken writes, "in everyday life it is usually in connection with some grandiose pretension by its priests or practitioners or some unseemly row or scandal among them...

...Abolish peotry as well...

...Mencken sigh) "it may be that, by thus moving away from religion, man is losing something...

...Incense will be swung beneath his outraged nose...

...Mencken stands forth as the unshaken apostle of the strictest school of the pure and unadulterated one-bet-on-the-ace Darwinians...

...So much for the main part of Mr...

...So did I: after I really got into Mr...

...I've done my penance...

...but yet (you may almost hear Mr...

...From that point of view, my own prayer has been well rewarded...

...Principally, this is due to priests...

...Mencken is a loyal soul...

...Their snarl-ings and odd antic posturings may create some distraction among the worshipers, and some may even fall out of the ranks to amuse themselves with these barbarian mountebanks...

...Mencken's epigram that "Everything we are we owe to Satan and his bootleg apple," which will become a classic utterance of provincial or small-town atheism, about on the same level as Mr...

...Mencken feel if somebody wrote to him in care of the American Methodist, instead of the American Mercury...

...All the rough-neck highbrows who have deserted their newspaper jobs to become book reviewers and book writers, and magazine hell-hounds of the godly since H. L. M. transformed the ineffable Smart Set into the American Mercury, and hewed the way for Dreiser and Cabell, and Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, will doubtless acclaim the new revelation of their leader with wild applause...

...But, alas, "for many generations, perhaps thousands of years, he [man: homo Menckenensis] found life increasingly unpleasant, for the cells of his cortex had been gradually proliferating, and the more they proliferated the more he was afflicted by a new curse: the power to think...

...Mencken stoutly asserts that "the best exposition of Catholic doctrine is probably The Faith of Our Fathers, by the late Cardinal Gibbons...

...And on a hundred pages of his new Bible for boobs (which yet is so very old a Bible) he sings his Credo: In the beginning (probably) there was something (if there was a beginning, because Einstein may yet prove that the end came first: tail-first so to speak...

...Mencken's naive and pathetic faith in primitive Darwinism, and the sad effect the doctrine has had upon his views of man and his destiny...

...It is the dullest book ever written by a brilliant man, al* Treatise on the Gods, by H. L. Mencken...

...Mencken, as soon as man began to think he began to suffer...

...But somebody in his publisher's office had sent his book to me in care of "The Calvin Publishing Corporation...

...And all this will be a logical outcome of his own theories as propounded in his new book...

...Nevertheless, no educated reader who is fairly well acquainted with the subject-matter need turn to Mr...

...Mencken calls "the boobs" that he flies from them...

...Mencken's free state of Maryland -and after whom our own humble publishing enterprise is named-has about as much in common with Calvin, the gloomy founder of hell-fire predestination and infant damnation, as Mr...

...and then (hurrah, now we're getting somewhere) there were monkeys, the sardonic cousins of man...

...or as if Bishop Cannon should try to define and illustrate the life adventures and works of H. L. Mencken...

...How would Mr...

...Mencken's treatise, considered as a summary of information, or as a contribution to knowledge, simply does not exist...

...According to Mr...

...H. L. Mencken gave up writing the weekly syndicate letter for a chain of Sunday newspapers which used to give his great body of readers so much pleasure, or rage, and in announcing this regrettable action he consoled his admirers and probably dismayed his enemies by saying he was taking time out from newspaper work in order to write a book...

...Mencken and his book...

...Mencken's stern doctrine) suggests anything rather than masculine, hard devotion to truth...

...Only a tiny fragment of mankind, anywhere, or at any time, is capable of the true faith, which is complete and absolute scepticism, combined, in these latter days, with science: which is the discovery, measurement, and stating of physical facts...

...He becomes a novelist: or, anyhow, a motion picture scenario writer of no mean ability...

...Mencken's book...

...Of course, they make distinctions in their admiration: they don't swallow Mr...

...For everything touched by him takes on some of his abounding vitality, lively interest, sardonic humor: it is stamped with his own brass-band style...

...Mencken's doctrine undiluted, and they analyze it before taking any particular draught of it, as prudent men must do, nowadays, with all their stimulants, alcoholic or intellectual...

...It dates and classifies Mr...

...H. L. Mencken, and very probably they prayed for him...

...Especially in this book...

...But that point is soon disposed of...

...His publishers are advertising widely Mr...

...Therefore "they deserve examination in a fair and scientific spirit...

...I prayed publicly and at length, as the readers of The Commonweal may remember...

...Now, The Commonweal is published by The Calvert Publishing Corporation...

...Mencken's dogma: for me it is plenty good enough, and man shows the common sense which among other qualities makes him man and makes him distinct from the rest of created things by the belief and the conduct which so outrages Mr...

...He follows those who made a new religion of materialism out of Darwin's facts and theories and speculations...

...It is not only because the mass of mankind is composed of what Mr...

...For them he has written a sort of Bible of village atheism...

...It is a pity that so many of the kicks are wasted on bogies...

...All newspapers nowadays have several rewrite men...

...They reject most of the mere superstitions that always accompany religion in this imperfect world of ours...

...For his sentences march as to a goose-step measure-every sentence has a kick in it, and each kick is an act of war...

...He hurls his book at them...

...but in their belief in some supreme and spiritual being at the centre of, yet transcending, all material phenomena, the truly representative men and women of the human race are in hearty agreement with the plain people...

...For Mencken, writing on religion, brings forth the sort of thing one might ex* pect if a tone-deaf man who (like Ambrose Bierce) considered music as the most irritating of all noises should write a book on Palestrina, Beethoven and Bach...

...Mencken all his life has by word and example stood up sturdily for home and hearth against the barbaric cosmopolitanism of hotel dwellers and neurotic tourists...

...He does not warn them against the proverbial indigestion...

...Mencken justly notes that all religions, but particulary the Jewish and the Christian faiths, cause the greatest of poetry to flourish...

...Mencken's less literate readers- whose name is legion-the case is far otherwise...

...As he increases in thinking power, his misery grows...

...He remembers his master, and prophet, Nietzsche, who long ago told us that we must "be hard...

...Mencken's book...

...Potter and Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, will preach upon texts drawn from it...

...Mencken has written a long book (oh, so, long, in places...

...As for his bitter and indiscriminating attack on the Jews, it is Junkerism at its worst...

...His faith, for example, is absolutely mystical and sublime...

...unquestionably it is one of the best of the many popular and highly simplified accounts of what Catholics believe-but, if Mr...

...Anyhow, I know that I prayed for him...

...Mencken's book for any new light upon it, nor even for an accurate outline of the matter...

...Mencken asserts in his preface that "Current theologies" (a curious phrase, by which presumably he means religious beliefs and the attempts to explain or define them) "have conditioned the thinking of mankind since the infancy of the race, and...

...One thinks of that sentimental and neurotic-and finally insane-little college professor, harried and haggard, with his conflicting devotions to Wagner and Bizet, hesitating as to whether he ought to dance on a tight rope across the abyss of life, or to take a hammer like Thor and smash all the Christian churches-and one wonders why Mr...

...What the greater part of Mr...

...I will leave it to the theologians to deal with the theological merits or demerits of Mr...

...And now-well, I will not say my prayer has been answered...

...It was a tough job, but I did it...

...Lon Chaney would make a superb figure as the proto-priest of the revelation of evolution, according to H. L. Mencken...

...If I was wrong in praying for this book, I've been properly punished...

...remain forces of great potency to this day," despite "what may be said against them on evidential grounds...

...At a time when so many scientists are deserting Darwin and Huxley, and when the clashing and quarreling of the multitudinous sects of evolution have reached a point which makes all the historical theological shindies insignificant (so far as clamor and publicity are concerned) Mr...

...That's enough to represent the general idea, to show Mr...

...Hollywood should grab for it...

...Like Jack London and H. G. Wells and Ignatius Donnelly, he tries his hand at imagining and depicting prehistoric conditions...

...So I could not and in fact did not blame my irritation on him...

...Mencken as witnesses to this fact...

...They make me think of what Arthur Edward Waite somewhere writes, when he describes the vagrants who search for fleas what time the procession passes on amid the sunshine, wreathed with flowers, singing chants of praise, amid gusts of incense, led by their priests, to the temple of the eternal...

...Mencken consider that what the great mass of mankind has always held to be true and good, in reality is false and bad...

...It is only valuable in that it throws light upon the central and fundamental principles animating and directing a man who has exercised an almost unprecedented influence-though briefly, and, I think, ephemerally-upon American life and letters...

...So I made an act of forgiveness, and plunged into the foaming, furious torrent of Mr...

...Mencken's first principles: his philosophy: the credo of his innermost faith...

...And I hope anyhow that his foes will read it...

...And if ever the anti-Goddites capture this country, as they are trying to capture Russia, Mr...

...I knew not what sort of book Mr...

...did not choose this volume as their book of the month-nay, their book of the year...

...In the first place, I began my reading handicapped by an active irritation...

...I say Prussian prose in a descriptive sense, neither praising nor blaming the effect produced by it (just now, at least) but simply as the best way I can think of to express the technical element of Mr...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Mencken's own definition of religion: which is that religion's "single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him...

...for he is at pains to record the further fact that most of the great literary geniuses and philosophers are on the side of the people...

...Why, as man began to think, and kept on increasing his power of thought, he should have delivered himself over body and soul to the pestiferous priests, Mr...

...He stands fast...

...I sincerely recommend it to Catholic seminaries and colleges as required reading: for the sake of the complete demonstration it gives of the baseless and confused and inconsistent and wildly unreasonable state of the case against religion as put forward by one of the most influential writers of today...

...The Greek sceptics, Mr...

...The queer new school of liberal theologians, like Dr...

...a sort of cook-book for the eaters of priests...

...And George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, the great Catholic gentleman who founded Mr...

...But Mr...

...Precisely...

...Sinclair Lewis's equally well-advertised stunt of getting into a pulpit and daring God to strike him dead...

...But why does Mr...

...Mencken will become a minor ikon (at the least) in the future temple of omnipotent man...

...Why not be hard...

...Religion is a farcical humbug, according to his gospel: and mankind, led by the really free and enlightened minds for whom Mr...

...Mencken's own "Americana" department in his magazine: the millions of men and women giving all their lives to serving the poor, the sick, the aged, the incurables, the insane, the lepers: the thousands of others devoting themselves to education and art and science and culture-all this news does not "get into the papers," and scientists of the Mencken type have no reliable criterion by which to measure and judge them...

...The roaring (but unconscious) humor of his picture of the first priest: of the lusty fellow who first discovered that when he took his club and smashed at some invading flood (instead of imitating the other cavemen by merely thwacking his wife) and then that by mere chance it happened that the flood stopped rising, that henceforth he was a priest, and could loaf the rest of his life and be fed by the tribe-all this is truly gorgeous...

...And yet a huge mistake will have been made: as they so often have been made in similar deifications...

...Very well: but the image invoked by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche (unfortunately for Mr...

...Mencken, who for so many years has been harrying the sentimental, sociological college professors, should select one of them as the prophet of his own evangel...

...I admired, and still admire H. L. M., and I said so, and prayed lustily for him, and was ready to take the consequences...

...It may be, he continues, "that religion, taking it by and large, at least makes human beings happier...

...For while Mr...

...Anyhow, according to Mr...

...It smacked of heresy...

...It is a newspaper rewrite man's production...

...facile and rapid composers of news stories and special articles built up of items telephoned into the office by reporters, and clippings hurriedly taken out of the newspaper's library (or "morgue") or facts (or fancies) taken out of the World Almanac or the Times Index or this or that encyclopedia or book or sometimes simply out of their own heads...

...Mencken's style...

...Even as concerns Catholicism, this admirable loyalty of H. L. M. is displayed...

...Mencken, of course, as a rewrite man, stands head and shoulders above most of that craft...

...It seems queer: but then the whole book is queer...

...He is already a hero: tomorrow he will be a myth: a few years later, and he may well become a god, or, anyhow, a godette, placed in the Pantheon of the Panners of Priests, among Voltaire, and Joseph Lewis, and Winwood Reade, and Bob Ingersoll, and Grant Allen, and a host of minor champions, with Lenin himself smiling from the high altar of atheism...

...but the main procession proceeds : and still it proceeds...

...5.00...

...though it has many passages in his best and most rousing style...

...I do not know how many of his readers responded...

...When we hear of it" (of religion) Mr...

...So in his bibliography Mr...

...I do know that many Catholics-including monks, friars, doctors of theology, and even bishops-justly admire Mr...

...About seven-tenths of the book is a restatement of the fantastic medley of facts or fancies, correct observations or wild surmises, scientific theories or purely imaginary pipe-dreams, of a weirdly incongruous group of previous writers on religion...

...Mencken's big book amounts to is an overwhelming attestation of the fact that the greater portion of mankind everywhere and at all times is religious: according to Mr...

...But as for Mr...

...Long ago he plumped for Darwin, and so he sticks by Darwin...

...But Cardinal Gibbons was and is a glory of Baltimore, and Mr...

...Mencken himself-in fact, a great deal less...

...Let the point pass...

...Mencken displays an unexpected side of his splendid literary gift...

...However-my Catholic charity getting the upper hand (with a struggle) of my all-too-human irritation -I blamed this bad start in getting at the job of reading Mr...

...Well, I suppose he would laugh it off...

...Indeed, I was a little frightened by the improvised character of my petition to the heavenly Powers on behalf of Mr...

...I should not wonder if the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (how these modern cults do love long and polysyllabic titles...

...Mencken possesses sturdy and permanent religious virtues...

...All the enormous, silent, powerful forces of religion flowing beneath the occasional scandals so avidly seized upon by news editors and Mr...

...And he asked his readers to pray for him so that he might be strengthened and upheld in his laborious task...

...For undoubtedly it was based on private judgment...

...It is lots of fun...

...Plato, Socrates and the Greek dramatists, are quoted by Mr...

...It is true, however, that this claim to the fair and impartial status of the scientist (which gave me the first of many laughs I enjoyed while reading the book) is severely jolted a few pages further on, where the newspaper training and habit of Mr...

...For I never expected such a horrendous book as this from H. L. M. But I felt bound to read it...

...Long ago, he was thrilled by the prose poetry of the neurotic German professor, and he will not desert him now when the humanists (Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More at their heads) and the super-humanists (the world-wide battalions of the reawakened Catholic religion) the priests at their head, are marching against the new barbarians of materialism...

...but here is the new book by Mr...

...Mencken's Prussian prose...

...Mencken informs us, are such men as Arcesilans, and Carneades, dug up out of the graves of time by their modern followers and put on the same shelf with their modern compeers: the Winwood Reades, and Grant Aliens, and Anatole Frances, and Robert Ingersolls, and others of that small minority of deniers of divinity who bob up from time to time, create a brief success of shock and scandal, and soon are forgotten and ignored...

...Mencken, as a sort of repetition of my prayer...

...to prove how vain religion is, and how mankind's self-created gods have plagued him for mil-leniums, and how all priests everywhere and always are worse pests than the gods they serve, nevertheless, the book proves that Mr...

...Karl Adam, of the University of Tubingen, Germany, the author of The Spirit of Catholicism...

...He does not follow Darwin: he is a Darwinian...

...Compared with such a book as Christopher Dawson's recent volume, The Gods, Mr...

...However, neither my bishop, still less the thunder of Rome, pronounced anathema against me...

...Knopf's office...

...A basic lack of comprehension would af-flict all such authors, as it has afflicted Mr...

...Mencken really wants his readers to study the doctrine he condemns it is well that he also mentions the Catholic Encyclopedia and Dr...