Second Mencken Chrestomathy (27 page)

It seems simple enough today, but it was not so simple when Huxley began. For years he was the target of assaults of almost unbelievable ferocity and malignancy. Every ecclesiastic in Christendom took a hack at him; he was denounced as the common enemy of God and man. Darwin, a mild fellow, threw “The Origin of Species” into the ring and then retired from the scene. It was Huxley who bore the brunt of the ensuing theological assault, and it was Huxley who finally beat it down, and forced the holy clerks to turn tail. It always amuses me today to read of intellectual clergymen championing what they call Modernism. Their predecessors of but two generations ago were unanimously engaged in trying to damn the first Modernist to Hell.

The row was over Darwinism, but before it ended Darwinism was almost forgotten. What Huxley fought for was something far greater: the right of civilized men to think freely and speak freely, without asking leave of authority, clerical or lay. How new that right is! And yet how firmly held! Today it would be hard to imagine living without it. No man of self-respect, when he has a thought to utter, pauses to wonder what the bishops will have to say about it. The views of bishops are simply ignored. Yet only sixty years ago they were still so powerful that they gave Huxley the battle of his life.

He beat them—beat them badly, and all their champions with them. His debate with Gladstone remains the greatest intellectual combat of modern times. Gladstone had at him with all the arts of the mob orator—and to them was added the passionate sincerity of a genuinely religious man. Huxley won hands down. Defeat became
a rout. Gladstone retired from the field completely undone, with his cause ruined forever. You will find the debate, in full, in the two volumes, “Science and Hebrew Tradition” and “Science and Christian Tradition.” Huxley’s contribution to it constitutes one of the glories of the Nineteenth Century. Far more than forty wars, far more than all the politicians of the century, far more even than the work of Darwin, it liberated the mind of modern man.

Huxley was not only an intellectual colossus; he was also a great artist; he knew how to be charming. No man has ever written more nearly perfect English prose. There is a magnificent clarity in it; its meaning is never obscure for an instant. And it is adorned with a various and never-failing grace. It never struts like the prose of Macaulay; it never simpers like Pater’s. It is simple, precise, unpretentious—and yet there is fine music in every line of it. The effects it achieves are truly overwhelming. One cannot read it without succumbing to it. Again I point to the two volumes of the debate with Gladstone. If they don’t thrill you, then go back to the sporting page.

From the
American Mercury
, April, 1929, pp. 509–10.
A review of T
HE
N
ATURE OF THE
P
HYSICAL
W
ORLD
, by A. S. Eddington, New York, 1928; and M
AN A
M
ACHINE
, by Joseph Needham, New York, 1928

The historian of science, writing a century hence, will probably treat our present age of marvels with a considerable jocosity. It is marked by researches and discoveries hitherto unparalleled in the world, but it is also marked by a vast groping and uncertainty. The physicists, baffled by the wonders unfolded before them, wobble all over the lot, and the biologists perform scarcely less comically. The easy certainties of a Huxley are no more. Millikan, in physics, attempts a grotesque compromise with theology, and Driesch, in biology, concocts a metaphysics that even many theologians would balk at. The two authors here under review show the sad effects of this demoralization. Dr. Eddington, an astronomer, leaps so far into interstellar space that, at the end of his book, he is forced to
admit gloomily that, even to himself, much of what he has written bears the aspect of “a well-meaning kind of nonsense.” And Dr. Needham, who is a biochemist, closes a brilliant demonstration that the living organism is a machine, and responsive to natural laws like any other, with the amazing confession that the mechanistic theory, in the last analysis, is only “a methodological fiction.”

What ails both of these learned men, and their brethren with them, is their constant assumption that what is known today is the sum total of possible knowledge. They protest endlessly that they assume nothing of the sort, but nevertheless they do so unconsciously, and the fact leads them into endless absurdities. For example, consider Dr. Eddington’s dealing with the Planck quantum theory. Starting out by showing that it knocks out the laws of causality, as those laws have been understood in the past, he proceeds gaily to the postulate that they do not exist at all, and from that postulate he goes on to speculations which lead him, in the end, to the borders of supernaturalism. But why assume that the quantum theory disposes of causation? All that it actually does is to confront us with a variety of causation which, at the moment, we are unable to account for. But it may be accounted for very plausibly tomorrow or next day. Meanwhile, it is certainly just as rational to assume that it will be as to assume that it won’t be. In the past man has solved far tougher problems. Why should it be set down as a fact that this one will forever baffle him?

Dr. Needham’s error is of the same order. He proves conclusively that, from the biologist’s stand-point, it is a sheer intellectual impossibility to think of the living organism as anything save a machine, and then he goes on to show that, from some other stand-point (say the theologian’s) it must be thought of as something different. But why waste any time thinking of it in that way? Is there anything in the general thinking of theologians which makes their opinion on the point of any interest or value? What have they ever done in other fields to match the fact-finding of the biologists? I can find nothing in the record. Their processes of thought, taking one day with another, are so defective as to be preposterous. True enough, they are masters of logic, but they always start out from palpably false premises. I see no reason why anyone should bother about their nonsensical caveats. Whether or not man is a machine is a fact to be established by an examination of the evidence.
If the answer turns out to be yes, then it will plainly be far from “a methodological fiction.” And if it is no, then the theologians will still have to prove their case. For the virtue of A cannot be demonstrated by showing that B is a rogue.

There is a vast need, in the physical sciences, for a new Huxley. The discoveries of Einstein, Planck and company have brought in a reign of intellectual chaos. The Millikans, Eddingtons and Driesches, though they are worthy men otherwise, seem to be unable to grapple successfully with the unrolling facts. In their discussions of the huge problems confronting the scientific fraternity there is comfort for New Thoughters, university pedagogues and Methodist bishops, but not much for the rest of us. What is called for is a genius capable of grappling with the confusion now prevailing and getting some order into it. I herewith issue a summons for candidates. Whoever fills the bill is sure of great fame.

From the New York
American
, Nov. 26, 1934

When I was a youngster, in the closing decades of the last century, two horrible plagues afflicted the American people. The first was the plague of flies and the second was that of corns. No one, in those days, knew how to get rid of either. We used to sleep under canopies of netting on Summer nights, but they were worse than useless, for on the one hand they kept out the air, and on the other they were no impediment to flies, which wriggled through their meshes and feasted on our carcasses within. By day these same flies gave their show on our dinner-tables, leaving us with cholera morbus or typhoid fever. On Sunday mornings they performed massively on clergy and laity; on weekdays they specialized in pedagogues and pupils. Save in the extreme North their season ran from Easter to Thanksgiving. While they raged, every American spent half his time dodging them, banging away at them, and damning them.

The curse of corns was almost as bad. Every man, woman and child in the country had them. There was no such thing as walking off in comfort in a new pair of shoes. The shoemakers shaped
their lasts to rub and hurt, and rub and hurt they did. All through the ’80s they grew narrower and narrower, until in the ’90s the so-called toothpick toe came in, and the whole nation began to limp. Does it seem comic, looking back? Then believe me, friends, it was not comic to the sufferers. Every drug-store window was full of corn-cures, but none of them really worked. Corn-doctors practised in every American community, gouging, gashing and spreading streptococci. Desperate men cut off their own toes. Children at play stopped to hop around on one foot, holding the other and yelling.

No one seemed to be able to imagine release from either plague. The flies were looked upon as quite as natural and necessary as the sunshine, and the corns seemed to be as inevitable as death or taxes. Yet they were got rid of in the end, and very easily. In the first case it was the automobile that did the trick. When it drove out the horse, it shut down hundreds of thousands of stables, and with the stables went the flies that bred in them. Simultaneously, some one invented the copper-mesh window-screen, and the tale was told. There had been window-screens in my youth, but they were made of iron wire, and rusted quickly, and the flies got through them. When the plan was tried of painting them—mainly with florid Alpine scenes—, it did no good. But then came the copper-mesh screen, and the last fly, staggering in from the last livery-stable, gave up the ghost. Today, in any well-regulated American home or hotel, it would be as startling to see one as to see a buzzard.

Who invented the copper-mesh screen I don’t know, but whoever he was, he deserves far better of his country than the inventor of the telephone, which is a boon but also a nuisance, or of the automobile, which is handy in its way but otherwise has taken the place of the sabre-toothed tiger and the wolf. The man who abolished corns remains almost as elusive, but nevertheless he may be tracked down and identified. He was a brigadier-general of the Army Medical Corps, by name Edward Lyman Munson.
^*
In 1912 he designed a last that really followed the shape of the human foot, and during the World War it was used in making shoes for
the Army. After the war the secular shoemakers began imitating it, and corns began to disappear. A little while longer, and they will be as rare as smallpox. Any shoe-dealer who knows his business can now supply a shoe that makes them next to impossible.

These two inventors—General Munson and the unknown who hit on the copper flyscreen—deserve far more from their country than they have got. They furthered human progress immensely, and without any drawbacks. Every other great invention seems to carry an affliction with it, but not theirs. The automobile kills its thousands, the telephone and the radio drive their thousands frantic, and the electric light has not only made the country bright, but also hideous. But the disappearance of the fly is pure velvet, and so is that of the corn.

From the
American Mercury
, Sept., 1931, p. 38

The steam locomotive, it appears, is doomed to follow the horse and buggy. It has disappeared from the N.Y., N.H. and H. up to New Haven, and it will presently disappear from the Pennsylvania down to Washington. Westward it will transform itself into an oil-burner, with no sparks on dark nights—or, worse, into a gasoline-burning flivver. A tragedy indeed, my masters! Something to moan and mourn about! For what other machine ever seen on earth is as stupendous as a locomotive thundering down a long stretch of track, with black smoke bursting from its stack and its mighty drivers pounding the rails? Where is there another such sight, at morning, noon or night? What other contrivance of human hands is so stately, so regal, so overpowering? A great ocean liner, at sea, is appallingly trivial looking; it thumps the imagination only when it is tied safe to a dock. A Zeppelin is a floating sausage. An airplane is not even a bird, but only a bug. An electric locomotive remains a toy, even though it weigh a hundred tons. But even a lowly yard engine, if there be steam in it, somehow fills and delights the eye. It belongs to the noble company of massive and gorgeous creatures—the elephants and whales, the mastodons and
behemoths, the ceratopsia and sauropoda, monarchs of land and sea. There is something fearsome and prehistoric about it: it is nearer to the dinosaur than to any living animal. It breathes flame like a volcano, and it rumbles like an earthquake. When one stands by the trackside as it thunders by, belching its acrid smoke, every sense is arrested and excited—sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. It stuns the mind, and coagulates the marrow of the bones. It is not a mere thing; it is a kind of cosmic event.

And now it is headed for the scrap-yard.

From the
Smart Set
, March, 1920, pp. 48–49

The Pennsylvania Railroad this side of Wilmington. To the left the Delaware River. Somewhere below Chester there passes a British tramp-steamer—a hideous monster in the new style, with the engine and funnel directly over the propeller—a dirty drab in color—squat and waddling like a corn-stuffed hog—a clumsy machine manned by greasy men in overalls. This is the heir of the Viking ships, the caravels and galleons, the lordly four-masters, the windjammers, the clippers. This is the successor of Drake’s
Golden Hind
—a tub full of union men. And think of her work in the world: to pile up money for the holders of first and second preferred stock, to haul cattle and baled hay, to ply endlessly between Cardiff and Philadelphia.

From the
American Mercury
, Sept., 1930, pp. 123–24.
A review of T
HE
W
ORST
J
OURNEY IN THE
W
ORLD
, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard; New York, 1930