Second Mencken Chrestomathy (28 page)

The journey that Mr. Cherry-Garrard describes was made during the Antarctic Winter of 1912; it took but a month, covered but
100 miles, and was no more than a minor incident of Captain Robert F. Scott’s successful (and fatal) dash to the South Pole. Nevertheless, it is probable that few travellers, ancient or modern, have ever met with greater difficulties or suffered greater agonies than Cherry-Garrard and his two companions, both of whom afterward perished with Scott.

The tale as he tells it—and he is a very candid and persuasive narrator—is really quite appalling. In a temperature that sometimes dropped to seventy-five degrees below zero, with dreadful hurricanes blowing, the three dragged their sleds across the glassy glaciers and tumultuous shore-ice of the Antarctic coast. To one side of them was the frozen sea: to the other loomed the sinister cone of Mt. Erebus, 13,350 feet high. They had no dogs or other transport animals. They had no shelter save a small tent. For thirty days and nights they struggled and suffered, shivered and shook. They fell into crevasses, were blinded by the whirling snow, and got lost in the trackless wastes. Horrible frost-bites tortured them. They went without food for days and saw their small supply of oil reduced to a few pints. But still they battled on, and at the end of their Dantesque month they were once more back at Scott’s base—three shaking, speechless and dreadful caricatures of men. And to what end? For what purpose did they risk their lives so heroically? They did it because they wanted to get some eggs of the Emperor penguin. They came back with three.

Mr. Cherry-Gerrard, I suspect, is quite conscious of the futility of the adventure. More, there is reason to believe that he has his sly opinion about the whole enterprise of Polar exploration, though he himself is one of its shining ornaments and escaped sharing Scott’s fate only by a hair. Certainly there is a plain touch of irony in his argument that such exploits as the one he describes so graphically are useful (and even necessary) to the progress of science. First he shows, on the authority of Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh (whoever he may be: I can’t find him in the reference-books) that the eggs of the Emperor penguin are enormously valuable—that they throw light upon the origin of all birds. And then he shows, on his own far safer testimony, that when he went to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington to get a receipt for those he had brought home at such cost he
found that no one took any interest in them, and that he himself was regarded as a nuisance. Was the joke here on the English as scientists, or on Cherry-Garrard as hero? Perhaps it was on both.

These penguin eggs, however much the pundits at South Kensington may disdain them, were yet the most valuable scientific baggage brought home from the Antarctic by the Scott expedition. Scott himself, struggling back from the Pole and freezing to death within eleven miles of a secure and even comfortable camp, had nothing save thirty pounds of fossils, none of them very interesting. They were recovered when his body was found, and are probably at South Kensington today, keeping company with the eggs. The other members of the party took endless meteorological observations, but there is no evidence that they discovered anything save what was already palpable to their five senses,
e.g.
, that it was very cold in such latitudes, that the Winter storms were most unpleasant, and that the glaciers kept on moving. Not all their observations were sufficient to save Scott and his four companions from death. They went to the Pole fully expecting, on the assurance of the expedition’s scientific staff, to find mild Summer weather, and were undone by a tremendous blizzard. Moreover, their medical experts helped them no more than their meteorologists. At least one of them seems to have died, not of the blizzard, but of scurvy. Mr. Cherry-Garrard says, indeed, that he now believes the expedition’s ration was grossly inadequate. Yet it had been planned very carefully, and was based upon Scott’s experience on the
Discovery
expedition, upon more than a year of preparatory work, and upon the unanimous counsel of his medical men.

The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. But just as an American business man, having amassed a fortune, always tries to make it appear that he never had any desire for money, but only wanted to set up an orphan asylum or get time to study golf, so a Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretension, but there is no need to take it seriously. Admiral Byrd actually took his armada South in order to be the first man to gape at the South Pole from an airship: the rest was no more than
lagniappe.
I am ready to venture that the whole scientific fruits of his enormously costly expedition were no greater than lowly zoölogists pluck every Summer at Wood’s Hole. As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish.

From the
Smart Set
, Jan., 1922, pp. 46–47

T
HE DIGNITY
of the learned professions, always assumed in discussions of them, succumbs quickly to analysis. What, realistically described, is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? In brief, he gets a living by convincing idiots that he can save them from a mythical Hell. It is a business, at bottom, almost indistinguishable from that of selling Texas oil stocks. As for a lawyer, he is simply, under our cash-register civilization, one who teaches scoundrels how to commit their swindles without risk. As for a physician, he is one who spends his whole existence trying to prolong the lives of persons whose deaths, in nine cases out of ten, would be a public benefit. The case of the pedagogue is even worse. Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant and, for the most part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees,
i.e.
, a committee of soap-boilers, nail-manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons.

There was a time when the profession of arms was honorable, but that is surely no longer true in America. The corps of officers of the United States Army seems to be fast sinking to the estate and dignity of a gang of longshoremen. One never picks up a newspaper without reading of the arrest of some officer or ex-officer for an offense involving dishonor. Not long ago one of them
was hanged for murder. A few days later another one, in prison for the same crime, asked for a pardon on the ground that, in the region where he was brought up, murder was not regarded as criminal. Swindles, defalcations, rowdyism, drunkenness, extortions, cruelties—such offenses are so common that they pass almost unnoticed. Some time ago, I ventured the guess that the democratization of the officers’ corps was to blame—that the introduction into it, by competitive examination, of youths unaccustomed to the amenities of civilization had destroyed the spirit left in it by Washington and Lee. But perhaps there is a more profound cause. Democracy, I daresay, is fundamentally opposed to that fine tradition of caste, that conscious superiority to ordinary temptations and ordinary aspirations, which makes the officer and gentleman. Warfare, as carried on by democracies, is inevitably polluted by the moral rages of inferior men. It converts itself into a sort of gang-fight, with bawling, yelling and biting in the clinches. Above all, it rejects the old ideal which prescribed an unimpassioned and chivalrous view of the enemy. Thus it grows less and less attractive to the old type of soldier. The general of tomorrow will be far more the evangelist and rabble-rouser than the gallant knight. And his officers, departing more and more from the type of Prince Eugene, will come closer and closer to the type of the Y.M.C.A. secretary.

From the
Smart Set
, May, 1920, p. 35

The tendency of all men to magnify their trades by
escamoterie
is beautifully displayed in the case of the railway conductors. The work that a passenger conductor does is so simple and so trivial that any average eighteen-year-old boy could learn it in a week. Moreover, the notion that he carries an enormous responsibility, that the lives of his passengers depend upon his skill and diligence, is fully ninety-nine per cent, buncombe: all of the actual responsibility is upon the locomotive engineer. Nevertheless, the
passenger conductors of the land, by parading before the public in florid uniforms and with heavy frowns upon their faces and by treating it in general as a German field-marshal must be expected to treat a mob of Socialist barbers, have so far convinced it of their importance that it consents readily to outrageous railway fares in order that they may be paid preposterous salaries, out of all reasonable proportion to their services. Of late the thing has gone even further. On many of the larger railways the conductor no longer deigns to collect tickets in person. Instead he stalks through the train with a so-called auditor, or adjutant, attending him, and this adjutant does all the actual work. And for this pompous parade the conductor is paid as much as a captain in the Army. In Europe the train conductor is paid probably one-fourth as much, and does ten times the work. He takes tips, but he earns them. A passenger who fees him may expect to get some service from him. He looks after windows, hears complaints politely, and even helps with the baggage. An American conductor would be staggered by any suggestion that he do such things. His sole duty is to enforce the notion of his stupendous dignity, to cow the boobery with his august and judicial mien, to keep up the grotesque farce that has made him what he is.

From the
Smart Set
, Dec., 1912, pp. 157

Genius is altogether too fine a word to apply to stage players, just as it is too fine a word to apply to opera singers, fiddlers, piano thumpers, college professors, and other such retailers of better men’s ideas. A first-rate actress, true enough, may be measurably better than a mere interpreter, a phonograph in skirts, a sentient marionette; she may actually add a valuable something to the thing created by the dramatist. But that something, after all, is no more than a good painter adds to a house. It is the architect and not the painter that creates the house, and in the same way it is the dramatist and not the actress that creates the character the actress
plays. Creation is an act of the highest cerebral centers. It takes out of any man who attempts it the best that is in him. When it is essayed by a true genius it takes out of him the best that is in the human race. But interpretation is usually as much a physical as a psychic matter. An actress with only one eye would be in worse case than an actress with only one cerebral hemisphere; a Mischa Elman with defective hearing and clumsy thumbs would simply cease to exist as a Mischa Elman. And yet Lafcadio Hearn, with only one eye, created words of undoubted genius, and Ludwig van Beethoven, with defective hearing, and Richard Wagner, with clumsy thumbs, each revolutionized the art of music. The test of a genius is that he creates something great and different. The test of an interpreter is that he does not reduce that greatness to the commonplace and that differentness to rote. The one is greatest when he gives us most of himself; the other is greatest when he best effaces himself.

From I
N
D
EFENSE OF
W
OMEN
, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 120–22

The American housewife of an earlier day was famous for her unremitting diligence. She not only cooked, washed and ironed; she also made shift to master such more complex arts as spinning, baking and brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is not only incompetent; she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading.

To call her a good cook, I daresay, was never anything but flattery; the early American cuisine was probably a fearful thing, indeed. But today the flattery turns into a sort of libel, and she resents it, or, at all events, does not welcome it. I used to know an American literary man, educated on the Continent, who married a woman because she had exceptional gifts in this department.
Years later, at one of her excellent dinners, a friend of her husband tried to please her by mentioning the fact, to which he had always been privy. But instead of being complimented, as a man might have been if told that his wife had married him because he was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, this unusual housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of usualness, denounced the guest as a liar, spilled soup on his waistcoat, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leave her husband.