Mencken & Morals

TREATISE ON RIGHT & WRONG--H. L. Mencken--Knopf ($3). Not many years ago Henry Louis Mencken was the god of U. S. liberal undergraduates, his lightest obiter dicta the unquestioned orders of their day. With a new. generation his authority has waned until now he appears an old-fashioned orthodox heretic. The men-of-straw he buffeted to the yelling delight of his admirers have by this time had such a bludgeoning that they look more like scarecrows than opponents. But he still goes on pounding the stuffing out of bogeymen that once seemed giants. Treatise on Right & Wrong, a companion piece to Treatise on the Gods, is Iconoclast Mencken's first book in four years and the first fruits of his retirement (last autumn) from the editorship of The American Mercury (TIME, Oct. 16). With a sturdy contempt for philosophers, metaphysicians and theologians ("They are specialists in penetrating the impenetrable, or they are nothing"), Mencken tramps into their jealously guarded sanctuaries and lays about him manfully with his 19th Century rationalist flail. Like its predecessor, Treatise on Right & Wrong purports to be an historical and comparative outline of human ethics; as before. Author Mencken is constantly distracted by the red herring of the Christian Churches. "All the branches of Christianity suffer by the fact that they seem to be unable to take in the greatest contribution of the modern world to ethical theory, to wit, the concept of a moral obligation to be intelligent. . . . Its moral system remains an easy and grateful refuge for the weak and the sick, the stupid and the misinformed, the confiding and the irresolute, but there is little in it to attract men and women who are intelligent and enterprising, and do not fear remote, gaseous and preposterous gods, and have a proper respect for the dignity of man."

There are still flashes of the old Mencken: "This moral reformer is a creature peculiar to relatively civilized societies; among savages he would be recognized instantly for the public enemy that he is, and disposed of out of hand." He speaks of Bolshevism and Fascism as "the new non-Euclidean theologies." Of the Catholic Church and its flock he writes jovially: "The whip it cracks over them is barbed with the fear of Hell, but the cracking is done with infinite discretion, and a fine understanding of psychology as she blows in the lower IQ brackets." But the necessities of an extended argument weigh heavily on Paragrapher Mencken's pen; much of the fire has gone out of his bluster. Treatise on Right & Wrong is written tiredly, its Menckenian tricksiness a little dingy from much wear. Carelessness sometimes trips him into such howlers as this: "Nero, as Tacitus tells us, illuminated his gardens at night by clothing them in shirts impregnated with pitch and then setting fire to them."

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