A Book of Burlesques by H. L. Mencken (ebook reader color screen .txt) 📗

the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn’t pay.

Patriotism. A variety of hallucination which, if it seized a bacteriologist in his laboratory, would cause him to report the streptococcus pyogenes to be as large as a Newfoundland dog, as intelligent as Socrates, as beautiful as Mont Blanc and as respectable as a Yale professor.

Pensioner. A kept patriot.

Platitude. An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Politician. Any citizen with influence enough to get his old mother a job as charwoman in the City Hall.

Popularity. The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

Posterity. The penalty of a faulty technique.

Progress. The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

Prohibitionist. The sort of man one wouldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.

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Psychologist. One who sticks pins into babies, and then makes a chart showing the ebb and flow of their yells.

Psychotherapy. The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.

Quack. A physician who has decided to admit it.

Reformer. A hangman signing a petition against vivisection.

Remorse. Regret that one waited so long to do it.

Self-Respect. The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Sob. A sound made by women, babies, tenors, fashionable clergymen, actors and drunken men.

Socialism. The theory that John Smith is better than his superiors.

Suicide. A belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.

Sunday. A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

Sunday School. A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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Surgeon. One bribed heavily by the patient to take the blame for the family doctor’s error in diagnosis.

Temptation. An irresistible force at work on a movable body.

Thanksgiving Day. A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.

Theology. An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

Tombstone. An ugly reminder of one who has been forgotten.

Truth. Something somehow discreditable to someone.

University. A place for elevating sons above the social rank of their fathers. In the great American universities men are ranked as follows: 1. Seducers; 2. Fullbacks; 3. Booze-fighters; 4. Pitchers and Catchers; 5. Poker players; 6. Scholars; 7. Christians.

Verdict. The a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.

Vers Libre. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read.

Wart. Something that outlasts ten thousand kisses.

Wealth. Any income that is at least $100 [210]more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Wedding. A device for exciting envy in women and terror in men.

Wife. One who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

Widower. One released on parole.

Woman. Before marriage, an agente provocateuse; after marriage, a gendarme.

Women’s Club. A place in which the validity of a philosophy is judged by the hat of its prophetess.

Yacht Club. An asylum for landsmen who would rather die of drink than be seasick.

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XII.—THE OLD SUBJECT
XII.—The Old Subject

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§ 1.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later. For another thing, they die earlier.

§ 2.

The man who marries for love alone is at least honest. But so was Czolgosz.

§ 3.

When a husband’s story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.

§ 4.

In the year 1830 the average American had six children and one wife. How time transvalues all values!

§ 5.

Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.

§ 6.

A man always blames the woman who fools [214]him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

§ 7.

Man’s objection to love is that it dies hard; woman’s is that when it is dead it stays dead.

§ 8.

Definition of a good mother: one who loves her child almost as much as a little girl loves her doll.

§ 9.

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little bit jealous. The way to lose him is to keep him a little bit more jealous.

§ 10.

It used to be thought in America that a woman ceased to be a lady the moment her name appeared in a newspaper. It is no longer thought so, but it is still true.

§ 11.

Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

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§ 12.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

§ 13.

How little it takes to make life unbearable!... A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman’s laugh!

§ 14.

The bride at the altar: “At last! At last!” The bridegroom: “Too late! Too late!”

§ 15.

The best friend a woman can have is the man who has got over loving her. He would rather die than compromise her.

§ 16.

The one breathless passion of every woman is to get some one married. If she’s single, it’s herself. If she’s married, it’s the woman her husband would probably marry if she died tomorrow.

§ 17.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon. Woman, that she was born so long ago.

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§ 18.

Woman is at once the serpent, the apple—and the belly-ache.

§ 19.

Cold mutton-stew; a soiled collar; breakfast in dress clothes; a wet house-dog, over-affectionate; the other fellow’s tooth-brush; an echo of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay”; the damp, musty smell of an empty house; stale beer; a mangy fur coat; Katzenjammer; false teeth; the criticism of Hamilton Wright Mabie; boiled cabbage; a cocktail after dinner; an old cigar butt; ... the kiss of Evelyn after the inauguration of Eleanor.

§ 20.

Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man.

§ 21.

The worst man hesitates when choosing a mother for his children. And hesitating, he is lost.

§ 22.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

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§ 23.

No man is ever too old to look at a woman, and no woman is ever too fat to hope that he will look.

§ 24.

Bachelors have consciences. Married men have wives.

§ 25.

Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they did’t they’d be married, too.

§ 26.

Man is a natural polygamist. He always has one woman leading him by the nose and another hanging on to his coat-tails.

§ 27.

All women, soon or late, are jealous of their daughters; all men, soon or late, are envious of their sons.

§ 28.

History seems to bear very harshly upon women. One cannot recall more than three famous women who were virtuous. But on turning to famous men the seeming injustice disappears. [218]One would have difficulty finding even two of them who were virtuous.

§ 29.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

§ 30.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him in a very handy form.

§ 31.

The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.

§ 32.

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

§ 33.

A man may be a fool and not know it—but not if he is married.

§ 34.

All men are proud of their own children. [219]Some men carry egoism so far that they are even proud of their own wives.

§ 35.

When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

§ 36.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.

§ 37.

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.

§ 38.

A bachelor is one who wants a wife, but is glad he hasn’t got her.

§ 40.

Women usually enjoy annoying their husbands, but not when they annoy them by growing fat.

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XIII.—PANORAMAS OF PEOPLE
XIII.—Panoramas of People

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I.—Men

Fat, slick, round-faced men, of the sort who haunt barber shops and are always having their shoes shined. Tall, gloomy, Gothic men, with eyebrows that meet over their noses and bunches of black, curly hair in their ears. Men wearing diamond solitaires, fraternal order watchcharms, golden elks’ heads with rubies for eyes. Men with thick, loose lips and shifty eyes. Men smoking pale, spotted cigars. Men who do not know what to do with their hands when they talk to women. Honorable, upright, successful men who seduce their stenographers and are kind to their dear old mothers. Men who allow their wives to dress like chorus girls. White-faced, scared-looking, yellow-eyed men who belong to societies for the suppression of vice. Men who boast that they neither drink nor smoke. Men who mop their bald heads with perfumed handkerchiefs. Men with drawn, mottled faces, in [224]the last stages of arterio-sclerosis. Silent, stupid-looking men in thick tweeds who tramp up and down the decks of ocean steamers. Men who peep out of hotel rooms at Swedish chambermaids. Men who go to church on Sunday morning, carrying Oxford Bibles under their arms. Men in dress coats too tight under the arms. Tea-drinking men. Loud, back-slapping men, gabbling endlessly about baseball players. Men who have never heard of Mozart. Tired business men with fat, glittering wives. Men who know what to do when children are sick. Men who believe that any woman who smokes is a prostitute. Yellow, diabetic men. Men whose veins are on the outside of their noses. Now and then a clean, clear-eyed, upstanding man. Once a week or so a man with good shoulders, straight legs and a hard, resolute mouth....

II.—Women

Fat women with flabby, double chins. Moon-faced, pop-eyed women in little flat hats. Women with starchy faces and thin vermilion lips. Man-shy, suspicious women, shrinking into their clothes every time a wet, caressing eye alights upon them. Women soured and [225]robbed of their souls by Christian Endeavor. Women who would probably be members of the Lake Mohonk Conference if they were men. Gray-haired, middle-aged, waddling women, wrecked and unsexed by endless, useless parturition, nursing, worry, sacrifice. Women who look as if they were still innocent yesterday afternoon. Women in shoes that bend their insteps to preposterous semi-circles. Women with green, barbaric bangles in their ears, like the concubines of Arab horse-thieves. Women looking in show-windows, wishing that their husbands were not such poor sticks. Shapeless women lolling in six thousand dollar motorcars. Trig little blondes, stepping like Shetland ponies. Women smelling of musk, ambergris, bergamot. Long-legged, cadaverous, hungry women. Women eager to be kidnapped, betrayed, forced into marriage at the pistol’s point. Soft, pulpy, pale women. Women with ginger-colored hair and large, irregular freckles. Silly, chattering, gurgling women. Women showing their ankles to policemen, chauffeurs, street-cleaners. Women with slim-shanked, whining, sticky-fingered children dragging after them. Women marching like grenadiers. Yellow women. Women with red hands. Women with asymmetrical eyes. [226]Women with rococo ears. Stoop-shouldered women. Women with huge hips. Bow-legged women. Appetizing women. Good-looking women....

III.—Babies

Babies smelling of camomile tea, cologne water, wet laundry, dog soap, Schmierkase. Babies who appear old, disillusioned and tired of life at six months. Babies that cry "Papa!" to blushing youths of nineteen or twenty at church picnics. Fat babies whose earlobes turn out at an angle of forty-five degrees. Soft, pulpy babies asleep in perambulators, the sun shining straight into their faces. Babies gnawing the tails of synthetic dogs. Babies without necks. Pale, scorbutic babies of the third and fourth generation, damned because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers read Tom Paine. Babies of a bluish tinge, or with vermilion eyes. Babies full of soporifics. Thin, cartilaginous babies that stretch when they are lifted. Warm, damp, miasmatic babies. Affectionate, ingratiating, gurgling babies: the larvæ of life insurance solicitors, fashionable doctors, Episcopal rectors, dealers in Mexican mine stock, hand-shakers, Sunday-school superintendents. Hungry babies, absurdly sucking [227]their thumbs. Babies with heads of thick, coarse black hair, seeming to be toupees. Unbaptized babies, dedicated to the devil. Eugenic babies. Babies that crawl out from under tables and are stepped on. Babies with lintels, grains of corn or shoe-buttons up their noses, purple in the face