Second Mencken Chrestomathy (26 page)

His fate at home, though his name is unknown, presents no difficulties to adepts at public psychology. The bad boys of the neighborhood, one may safely assume, got to the scene first of all and were delighted by the show, but upon their heels came the local
pastor, and in two minutes he was bawling for the police. The ensuing trial attracted such crowds that for weeks the sabre-toothed tiger (
Machœrodus
) and the wooly rhinoceros (
R. antiquitatus
) roamed the wilds unmolested, feasting upon colporteurs and wandering flint pedlars. The fellow stood confronted by his unspeakable and unparalleled felony, and could only beg for mercy. Publicly and without shame, he had performed a feat never performed by man before:
ergo
, it was as plain as day that he had engaged, anteriorly, in commerce with the powers of the air. So much, indeed, was elemental logic: even a lawyer could grasp it. But
what
powers? There the clergy certainly had something to say, and what they said must have been instantly damning. They were themselves the daily familiars of all reputable powers of the air, great and small. They knew precisely what could be done and what could not be done. Their professional skill and knowledge were admitted everywhere and by all. What they could not do was thus clearly irregular and disreputable: it issued out of an unlawful transaction with fiends. Any other theory would be laughable, and in plain contempt of court. One pictures the learned judge summing up, and one pictures the headsman spitting on his hands. That night there was a head on a pole in front of the episcopal cave of the ordinary of the diocese, and more than one ambitious cave hyena (
H. spelaea
) wore himself out trying to shin up.

But the secret did not pass with the criminal. He was dead, his relatives to the third degree were sold into slavery to the Chellean heathen down the river, and it was a capital offense, with preliminary tortures, to so much as mention his name. But in his last hours, one must bear in mind, he had a spiritual adviser to hear his confession and give him absolution for his sorcery, and that spiritual adviser, it is reasonable to assume, had just as much natural curiosity as any other clergyman. So it is not hard to imagine that he wormed the trick out of the condemned, and later on, as in duty bound, conveyed it privately to his bishop. Nor is it hard to imagine its plans and specifications becoming generally known,
sotto voce
, to the adjacent clergy, nor some ingenious holy clerk presently discovering that they could be carried out without bringing any fiends into the business. The lawful and laudable powers of the air, already sworn to the service of Holy Church, were quite
as potent: a hint from the bishop, then as now, was sufficient to set them to work. And so, if there is no flaw in my reasoning, the making of fire soon became one of the high privileges and prerogatives of the sacred office, forbidden to the laity upon penalty of the stone ax, and reserved in practise for high ceremonial uses and occasions. The ordination of a new rector, I suppose, was such an occasion. The consecration of a new cave was another. And among the uses were the laying of demons, the pursuit and scotching of dragons and other monsters, the abatement of floods and cyclones, the refutation of heresies, and the management of the sun, so that day always followed night and Spring came after Winter. I daresay fees were charged, for the clergy must live, but there was never any degradation of the new magic to sordid, secular uses. No one was allowed a fire to keep warm, and no one was allowed one to boil a bone.

It would be interesting to try to figure out, by the doctrine of probabilities, how long fire was thus reserved for sacramental purposes. The weather being, at this writing, too hot for mathematical exercises, I content myself with a guess, to wit, 10,000 years. It is probably over-moderate. The obvious usefulness of fire was certainly not enough to bring it into general use; it had to wait for the slow, tedious, extremely bloody growth of skepticism. No doubt there were heretics, even during the first two or three millennia, who set off piles of leaves far back in the woods, gingerly, cautiously and half expecting to be potted by thunderbolts. Perhaps there were even renegade clergymen who, unsettled in their faith by contemplation of
Pithecanthropus erectus
, the remote grandfather of the
P. biblicus
of our present Christian age, threw off the sacerdotal chemise, took to flight, and started forest fires. But the odds against such antinomians, for many centuries, must have been almost as heavy as the odds against an atheist in Dallas, Tex., today. They existed, but only as outlaws, with the ax waiting for them, and Hell beyond the ax. The unanimous sentiment of decent people was against them. It was plain to every one that a world in which they went unscotched would be a world resigned to sin and shame.

Nevertheless, they continued to exist, and what is worse, to increase gradually in numbers. Even when the regular force of police
was augmented by bands of volunteer snouters, organized to search out unlawful fires in the deep woods and remote deserts, there were heretics who persisted in their contumacy, and even undertook to defend it with all the devices of sophistry. At intervals great crusades were launched against them, and they were rounded up and butchered by the hundred, and even by the thousand. The ordinary method of capital punishment prevailing in those times—to wit, decapitation with fifteen or twenty strokes of a stone ax—was found to be ineffective against such agents of the Devil, and so other and more rigorous methods were devised—chief among them, boiling to death in a huge pot set over a temple fire. More, the ordinary criminal procedure had to be changed to facilitate convictions, for the heretics were highly skilled at turning the safeguards of the law to their baleful uses. First, it was provided that a man accused of making fire should be tried, not before the judges who sat in common criminal cases, but before judges especially nominated for the purpose by the priests, or by the Anti-Fire League, an organization of citizens pledged to law and order. Then it was provided that no such prisoner should be permitted to consult counsel, or to enjoy the privilege of bail, or to call witnesses in his behalf. Finally, after all these half measures had failed, it was decided to abandon the whole sorry hocus-pocus of trial and judgment, and to hand the accused over to the public executioner at once, without any frivolous inquiry into the degree of his guilt.

This device seemed to work very well for a while. It worked very well, indeed, for perhaps 5,000 years. There were times during that long period when contraband fire-making seemed to be practically extinct in the world. Children grew up who had never seen a fire save in its proper place: a place of worship. Come to maturity, they begat children equally innocent, and so the thing went on for generations. But always, just as the fire heresy seemed about to disappear from human memory, some outlaw in the wilds revived it. These revivals sometimes spread as rapidly as their own flames. One year there would be complete peace everywhere and a spirit of obedience to the law; the next year bon-fires would suddenly sparkle in the hills, and blasphemous whispers would go ’round. The heretics, at such times, made great play at the young. They
would lure boys into the groves along the river-bottoms and teach them how to roast chestnuts. They would send in spies disguised as Chellean serving-maids to show little girls how much easier it was to do the family washing with hot water than with cold. The constituted authorities answered such defiance with vigorous campaigns of law enforcement. Fireleggers were taken by the thousand, and put to death at great public ceremonials. But always some escaped.

In the end (or, at all events, so I work it out by the devices brought in by the new science of biometrics) enough escaped to make further proceedings against them dangerous and even impossible. No doubt it happened in what is now Southern France, in the region called the Dordogne. The fireleggers, taking to the hills, there organized a sort of outlaw state, and presently began passing laws of their own. The first of such laws, no doubt, converted fire-making from a crime into a patriotic act: it became the principal duty of every right-thinking citizen to keep a fire burning in front of his cave. Amendments soon followed. It became a felony to eat uncooked food, or to do the family washing in cold water. It became another to put out a fire, or to advocate putting it out, or to imagine putting it out.

Thus priests were barred from that outlaw state, and it became necessary to develop a new class of men skilled in public affairs, and privy to the desires of the gods. Nature responded with politicians. Anon these politicians became adept at all the arts that have distinguished them ever since. They invented new and more rigorous laws, they imposed taxes, they conscripted the fireleggers for military service. One day, having drilled a large army, they marched down into the plains, tackled the hosts of the orthodox, and overcame them. The next day the priests who had led these hosts were given a simple choice: either they could admit formally that fire-making for secular purposes was now lawful and even laudable, or they could submit to being burned alive upon their own sacramental pyres. Great numbers of them went heroically to the stake, firm in the hope of a glorious resurrection. The rest, retiring to their crypts and seeking divine guidance, emerged with the news that the gods were now in favor of universal fire-making. That night there was a cheerful blaze in front of every cave for
miles around, and the priests themselves sat down to a hearty banquet of roast megatherium (
M. cuvieri
). Eight thousand years later a heretic who revived the primeval pagan habit of eating raw oysters was put to death for atheism.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, May 4, 1925

On May 4, 1825, at Ealing, a third-rate London suburb, there was born Thomas Henry Huxley, the son of a schoolmaster. I mention Huxley
père
in sheer humane politeness; having discharged his august biological function, he passed into the obscurity whence he had come. Young Thomas Henry, it appears, was almost wholly the son of his mother. He had her piercing eyes, he had her dark comeliness, and he had, above all, her sharp wits. “Her most distinguishing characteristic … was rapidity of thought.” What her lineage was I don’t know, but you may be sure that there was good blood in it.

Huxley was educated in third-rate schools and studied what was then regarded as medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. In 1846, having no taste for medical practise, he joined the British Navy as an assistant surgeon, and was presently assigned to the
Rattlesnake
for a cruise in the South Seas. He was gone four years. He came back laden with scientific material of the first importance, but the Admiralty refused to publish it, and in 1854 he resigned from the navy and took a professorship in the Royal School of Mines. Thereafter, for forty years, he was incessantly active as teacher, as writer and as lecturer. No single outstanding contribution to human knowledge is credited to him. He was not so much a discoverer as an organizer. He found science a pretty intellectual plaything, with overtones of the scandalous; he left it the chief serious concern of civilized man. The change aroused opposition, some of it immensely formidable. Huxley met that opposition by charging it, breaking it up, and routing it. He was one of the most pertinacious fighters ever heard of in this world, and one of the
bravest. He attacked and defeated the natural imbecility of the human race. In his old age the English, having long sneered at him, decided to honor him. They made him a privy councillor, and gave him the right to put “The Right Hon.” in front of his name and “P.C.” after it. The same distinction was given at the same time to various shyster lawyers, wealthy soap manufacturers and worn-out politicians.

Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks of him inevitably in terms of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man. A touch of the poet was in him, and another of the romantic, gallant knight. He was, in almost every way, the perfected flower of
Homo sapiens
, the superlatively admirable all-’round man.

Only too often on meeting scientific men, even those of genuine distinction, one finds that they are dull fellows and very stupid. They know one thing to excess; they know nothing else. Pursuing facts too doggedly and unimaginatively, they miss all the charming things that are not facts. Such scientists are responsible for the poor name which science so frequently carries among plain men. They radiate the impression that its service is dehumanizing—that too much learning, like too little learning, is an unpleasant and dangerous thing. Huxley was a sort of standing answer to that notion. His actual knowledge was probably wider than that of any other man of his time. By profession a biologist, he covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn’t simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything. But he was by no means merely learned; he was also immensely shrewd. I thumb his essays at random. Here is one on the Salvation Army—the most realistic and devastating treatise upon that maudlin imposture ever penned.
Here is one on capital and labor—a complete
reductio ad absurdum
of the Marxian balderdash in 3,000 words. And here is one on Berkeley’s metaphysics—a perfect model of lucid exposition.

All of us owe a vast debt to Huxley, especially all of us of English speech, for it was he, more than any other man, who worked that great change in human thought which marked the Nineteenth Century. All his life long he flung himself upon authority—when it was stupid, ignorant and tyrannical. He attacked it with every weapon in his rich arsenal—wit, scorn, and above all, superior knowledge. To it he opposed a single thing: the truth as it could be discovered and established—the plain truth that sets men free.