Second Mencken Chrestomathy Read Online Free Page A

originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night.
    A certain sough of rhetoric may be here, but fundamentally I am quite sincere. For example, in the matter of attaining to ease in Zion, of getting a fair share of the national swag. It seems to me, sunk in my Egyptian night, that the man who fails to do this in the United States today is a man who is hopelessly stupid—maybe not on the surface, but certainly deep down. Either he isone who cripples himself unduly, say by setting up a family before he can care for it, or by making a fool’s bargain for the sale of his wares, or by concerning himself too much about the affairs of other men; or he is one who endeavors fatuously to sell something that no normal American wants. Whenever I hear a professor of metaphysics complain that his wife has eloped with an ice-man who can at least feed and clothe her, my natural sympathy for the man is greatly corrupted by contempt for his lack of sense. Would it be regarded as sane and laudable for a man to travel the Soudan trying to sell fountain-pens, or Greenland offering to teach double-entry bookkeeping? Coming closer, would the judicious pity or laugh at a man who opened a shop for the sale of incunabula in Little Rock, Ark., or who demanded a living in McKeesport, Pa., on the ground that he could read Sumerian?
    One seeking to make a living in a country must pay due regard to the needs and tastes of that country. Here in the United States we have no jobs for grand dukes, and none for palace eunuchs, and none for masters of the buckhounds—and very few for oboe-players, assyriologists, water-colorists, stylites and epic poets. There may come a time when the composer of string quartettes is paid as much as a railway conductor, but it is not yet. Then why practise such trades—that is, as trades? The man of independent means may venture into them prudently; when he does so, he is seldom molested; it may even be argued that he performs a public service by adopting them. But the man who has a living to make is simply silly if he embraces them; he is like a soldier going over the top with a coffin strapped to his back. Let him abandon such puerile vanities, and take to the uplift instead, as, indeed, thousands of other victims of the industrial system have already done. Let him bear in mind that, whatever its neglect of the humanities and their monks, the Republic has never got half enough quack doctors, ward leaders, phrenologists, circus clowns, magicians, soldiers, farmers, popular song writers, detectives, spies and
agents provocateurs
. The rules are set by Omnipotence; the discreet man observes them. Observing them, he is safe beneath the starry bed-tick, in fair weather or foul.
Boobus Americanus
is a bird that knows no closed season—and if he won’t come down to Texas oil stock, or one-night cancer cures, or building lots in Swampshurst,he will always come down on Inspiration and Optimism, whether political, theological, pedagogical, literary or economic.
    The doctrine that it is
infra dignitatem
for an educated man to take a hand in the snaring of this goose is one in which I see nothing convincing. It is a doctrine chiefly voiced, I believe, by those who have tried the business and failed. They take refuge behind the childish notion that there is something honorable about poverty
per se
, but this is nonsense. Poverty may be an unescapable misfortune, but that no more makes it honorable than a cocked eye is made honorable by the same cause. Do I advocate, then, the ceaseless, senseless hogging of money? I do not. All I advocate—and praise as virtuous—is the hogging of enough to provide security and ease. Despite all the romantic superstitions to the contrary, the artist cannot do his best work when he is oppressed by unsatisfied wants. Nor can the philosopher. Nor can the man of science. The clearest thinking of the world is done and the finest art is