The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Forgotten Men,” by H.L. Mencken

Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

In this 1928 essay, Mencken’s thesis is that history is written by second-rate men, and even the first-rate men are reduced to expressing themselves in second-rate ways in order to be understood by their listeners. He takes some pot-shots at Plato, and then theorizes that obviously there were regular Greeks during Plato’s time who went to the pubs after work and laughed about Plato and his pretensions and bossypants-nature and came up with solutions to the problems of Life in total opposition to Plato’s ideas. Mencken wants to hear from THOSE people, not just Plato, but unfortunately history does not work that way. In another column, he decimates the idea that all wisdom hails from ancient Greece and you can feel that contempt here. But it’s not just ancient Greece. He goes after the ancient Jews as well, basically saying that if the best they could give us was the Book of Genesis, then that is not saying much for their intellectual capacity. Surely there were intelligent men back then of the same tribe, who disagreed with the prevailing story? Why can’t we hear from THEM? Because. Mencken suggests that history, as we know it, is a watered-down boiled-down simplified entity, and the stuff that survives is second-rate BECAUSE it was aimed at the lowest-common-denominator. So the acolytes who clustered around Plato, thinking every utterance was brilliant, had every motive for excluding the critics who drank wine while barking stuff like, “That Plato is a dumb-ass!” The image Mencken paints of drunken yahoos taking down Plato’s ideas on a nightly basis in the evening joints of ancient Greece is hilarious.

Mencken starts us off with that (a sacred cow of the international variety) and then zooms in on a sacred cow of the national variety. Abraham Lincoln, as a man, and Abraham Lincoln as a politician/public speaker, two distinct entities in Mencken’s view. And, come to think of it, in Spielberg’s view, too. Mencken goes after the Gettysburg Address, an utterance which he does not admire. Them’s fighting words, Henry! Which, naturally, is why he goes after it. He thinks Lincoln was a complex man and clearly an intelligent once (Mencken cites Lincoln’s penchant for storytelling as evidence of Lincoln’s intelligence). Any man who devotes most of his life to telling stories like that and tall tales and parables and fables is clearly intelligent, and good company to boot. But Lincoln threw it all away in the Gettysburg Address, according to Mencken. Lincoln, as a politician, was forced to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and therefore his expression suffered. (But here I’ll stop with the summary, and let Henry take over in the excerpt below.)

Funny coincidental dovetail: Just this past week, the Pennsylvania newspaper The Patriot News, published a retraction of an 1863 op-ed piece that criticized the Gettysburg address. (That’s a pretty clever piece, by the way. I especially love how the opening reflects the famous opening of Lincoln’s speech.)

In other news: Elvis could recite the Gettysburg Address by heart. It’s easily memorizable, of course, being short.

Anyway, let’s listen to Mencken tear up a sacred piece of American history!

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Forgotten Men,” by H.L. Mencken

[Lincoln] was, I believe, one of the most intelligent men ever heard of in his realm – but he was also a politician, and, in his last years, President of the Federal Union. The fact worked an immemorial cruelty upon him when he visited the battlefield of Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863. One may easily imagine the reflections that the scene and the occasion must have inspired in so sagacious and unconventional a man – at all events, one may imagine the more obvious of them. They were, it is highly probably, of an extremely acrid and unpleasant nature. Before him stretched row upon row of new-made graves; around him ranged the gaunt cinders of a witless and abominable war. The thought must have occurred to him at once that —

But before him there also stretched an acre or two of faces – the faces of dull Pennsylvania peasants from the adjacent farms, with here and there the jowls of a Philadelphia politician gleaming in the pale Winter sunlight. It was too cold that day to his badly-cushioned bones for a long speech, and the audience would have been mortally offended by a good one. So old Abe put away his reflections, and launched into the tried and sure-fire stuff. Once started, the furor loquendi dragged him on. Abandoning the simple and crystal-clear English of his considered utterance, he stood a sentence on its head, and made a pretty parlor ornament of it. Proceeding, he described the causes and the nature of the war in terms of the current army press bureau. Finally, he launched a sonorous, meaningless epigram, and sat down. There was immense applause. The Pennsylvania oafs were delighted. And the speech remains in all the school-books to this day.

Lincoln had too much humor in him to leave a diary, and so we do not know what he thought of it the day following, or a month later, or a year. But it is safe to assume, I believe, that he vacillated often between laughing at it sourly and hanging himself. For he was far too intelligent to believe in any such Kiwanian bombast. He could no more have taken it seriously than he took the strutting of Mr. Secretary Seward seriously, or the cerebral steam-pressure of General Grant. He knew it, you may be sure, for what it was. He was simply doomed, like many another good man before and after him, to keep his soundest and loftiest thoughts to himself. Just as Plato had to adapt his most penetrating and revolutionary thoughts to the tastes and comprehension of the sophomores assembled to hear him, so Lincoln had to content himself, on a great occasion, with ideas comprehensible to Pennsylvania Drunkards, which is to say, to persons to whom genuine ideas were not comprehensible at all. Knowing their theological principles, he knew that, in the political field, they grazed only on pansies.

Nor is this all. The highest flights of human intellect are not only inordinately offensive to the overwhelming majority of men; they are also, at least in large part, incapable of reduction to words. Thus the best thought of the human race does not appear in its written records.