of stupidity upon the unfamiliar. Because, forsooth, the ideals and standards to which I adhere are not the sweet and soothing ones to which the Hon. Mr. Dunham himself adheres, he comes to the solomonic judgment that I have no ideals and standards at all! But do not laugh. The absurdity into which this virtuous and well-meaning, if somewhat naif and unreflective, gentleman falls is one which occasionally engulfs the best of men. The most difficult of all mental processes, indeed, is that of grasping the other fellow’s point of view, particularly with sympathy. And when we enter the domain of morals that difficulty becomes a practical impossibility. It is a first article of faith with all of us that those whose morals differ from our own have no morals at all. We habitually denominate them, indeed, by the simple word “immoral.”
Nine times out of ten, of course, this use of the word is idiotic, for very few persons, in point of fact, are wholly immoral. Even those persons whose immorality is assumed by an almost unanimous public opinion are often devotees of a rigid and austere moral code. For example, the unfortunate women whose pursuit and persecution are so significantly attractive to a certain type of “moral” man. These women, true enough, habitually violate one of the Ten Commandments, and are thus immoral by our prevalent standards, but it would vastly surprise some of their pursuers to know how sternly moral they are in other respects—for example, how honorable they are in their dealings with one another, how violently they disapprove the man who seeks to bring other women to their plight, and how unyieldingly they frown upon that snivelling hypocrisy which sometimes offers them a way out. Ask one of these women what she thinks of any conspicuous moralist of our vicinage, and it is a safe bet that she will tell you he is cruel and mendacious—i. e., that he is immoral.
So much for the morality of a class generally admitted to be sub-moral. What is constantly forgotten is that there are also classes which properly deserve to be called super-moral. That is to say, there are classes which accept all, or at least nearly all, of the restrictions imposed by the current popular morality, and then add restrictions that the popular morality does not demand. The gentlemen of the monastic orders offer a familiar example: some of them reach a degree of morality quite impossible, and even unimaginable, to the average man, or even to the average professional moralist. And one finds something of the same sort, though in less degree, among prohibitionists, vegetarians, Sabbatarians, Moslem dervishes, and the breed of kill-joys and uplifters in general.
No need to say that all of these super-moral persons have been, and are today, regarded as atrociously immoral by other persons of sound mind. The doctrine that asceticism is immoral once attained to such wide acceptance that it contributed very largely to an epoch-making schism in the Christian church, and it is still held today, I believe, by fully eight Protestants out of ten. (Even among those who approve of ascetism some of its earlier manifestations are now regarded as immoral; for example, self-mutilation, flagellation and immersion in filth, all of which had countenance, popularly if not officially, in the first centuries of our era.) And one need not walk 20 steps to find a man who believes the prohibitionists to be tyrannical and dishonest, and hence immoral, or another man to denounce the Blue Laws, or animal-worship, or the Moslem holy war.
Thus it appears that morality, considered broadly, is a gem of many facets, and that the man who clings to one of them gets a sadly distorted view of the men clinging to the others. On some rules of morality, true enough, most civilized men agree, for example: on the rule against punching out the eyes of sleeping babies with tack pullers. But on the vast majority of rules opinion is anything but unanimous, even among persons who regard themselves as conventionally moral. I know hundreds of men who would rather starve than steal, and yet most of them habitually violate the Sabbath without the slightest sense of sin, and some of them swear like archdeacons, or gamble for money, or go to burlesque shows, or perform some other act that would give the Hon. Jack Cornell the fantods. Worse, all of them regard Jack as an immoral and abhorrent fellow, basing their opinion upon the very snoutery that is the foundation of his moral eminence among professional moralists!
Viewing the Hon. Mr. Dunham’s allegation from such lofty peaks, I can well afford to pronounce upon it a superior Pooh-pooh! and so let it go. My own personal morality seems to me to be vastly more austere and elevating than that with which the hon. gent. contrasts it—to wit, the morality of the Sunpaper. I could fill this whole column with a list of things that the Sunpaper has done in the past, and that I myself wouldn’t dare to do. For example, I would never print a line in praise or defense of such a charlatan as the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, knowing his character as I know it, and as the Sunpaper knows it, and as every intelligent American knows it. Again, I would never make a noisy pretense of neutrality in a great and bloody war, and then attack one of the contestants unfairly under cover of it, as the Sunpaper did in August last, and as Monsignor Russell properly denounced it for doing. Yet again—
But no more examples! I am not going to gloat over the poor old Sunpaper because my moral code happens to be too harsh and exacting for it. Nor am I going to revile the Hon. Mr. Dunham because that code is beyond his comprehension. He is, I take it, a virtuous man, and he probably does his darndest within his limitations. If the higher sort of honesty is over his head, he is at least in numerous company. To the average, everyday, unreflecting, platitude-eating man, the truth ever bears a sinister and forbidding aspect. He regards it as immoral, and with reason. If it prevailed in the world, then nine-tenths of the things that he believes in, and that give his life a meaning, and that soothe him and comfort him, and fill him with a pleased, boozy feeling of rectitude and security, would be blown up. [5 November 1914]
MENCKEN AND MATERIALISM
Some anonymous friend in the long-suffering Letter Column:
[The Hon. Mr.] Mencken’s * * * eyes are earthbound. Ethics of the mud. A gross materialist, that fellow, with only earth fires to lighten him.
Empty nonsense, true enough, but nevertheless it bobs up in the Letter Column regularly. One of the hardest of all things for a professed idealist to believe is that the man who dissents from his particular idealism may be an idealist also. This difficulty is at the bottom of most of the political and theological wars that rack the world. The first charge that one disputant makes against another is always that he is a materialist, that he has no idealism. And the counter-charge is always exactly the same. The whole dispute between Catholic and Protestant, Democrat and Monarchist, Christian and Jew, may be reduced to just such terms. The Englishman scorns the German as a worshiper of force; the German scorns the Englishman as a worshiper of ease; the Frenchman sniffs at both as gross and materialistic; both denounce the Frenchman as a voluptuary and an atheist. And so on and so on.
Every man is thus convinced, not only of the brutish materialism of the other fellow, but also and more especially of his own lofty idealism. I myself, for example, though constantly accused of neglecting the things of the spirit (and, from the standpoint of my critics, with excellent cause), am nevertheless an almost fanatical idealist in my own sight. As I look back over my life I see a long record of more or less steady devotion to worthy ideals, often at a heavy sacrifice of material benefits. The picture is intensely agreeable to me; in it I take on a sort of mellow, romantic aspect; I am positively touched. And yet my life, to many other men, must needs appear grossly materialistic, for its net results, to date, are that I am fat, that I have stopped going to Sunday-school, and that my conscience seldom bothers me.
Even when two men pursue one and the same ideal, they often fall into irreconcilable differences over the manner of its attainment. Consider, for example, the commonplace ideal, visioned by practically all of us, of a carefree and happy human race. I should like to see it realized, and Dr. Kelly would like to see it realized. But observe how vastly we differ in our plans for its realization. My plan is to let people do whatever they please, so long as they do not invade the right and freedom of other persons to do the same: that is, I see liberty of desire, of taste, of action as the capital essential to happiness. But Dr. Kelly, with the very same end in view, advocates a diametrically contrary route to its attainment. That is to say, he proposes to make people happy by force, by terrorism, by compulsion. His
