Sentimental Writing: "Mush for the Multitude"
But do not laugh too much, dear friend, however hard your heart, however tough your hide. The mission of such things as Bambi is, after all, no mean one. Remember the fat woman--how it will make her forget that she is fat. Remember the tired business man--how it will lift him out of his wallow and fill him with a noble enthusiasm for virtue and its rewards. Remember the flapper--how it will thrill her to the very soles of her feet and people her dreams with visions of gallant knights and lighten that doom which makes her actual beau a baseball fan and corrupts him with a loathing for literature and gives him large, hairy hands and a flair for burlesque shows and freckles on his neck. And so to other things.
("Mush for the Multitude," The Smart Set, 1914)
Mark Twain
And what a man Mark Twain was! How he stood above and apart from the world, like Rabelais come to life again, observing the human comedy, chuckling over the fraudulence of man! . . . He regarded all men as humbugs, but as humbugs to be dealt with gently, as humbugs too often taken in and swindled by their own humbuggery.
("Our One Authentic Giant," The Smart Set, February 1913)
The Purpose of Education
Education in the truest sense--education directed toward awakening a capacity to differentiate between fact and appearance--always will be a more or less furtive and illicit thing, for its chief purpose is the controversion and destruction of the very ideas that the majority of men--and particularly the majority of official and powerful men--regard as incontrovertibly true. To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches. Progress consists precisely in attacking and disposing of these ordinary beliefs.
(Review of H.G. Wells Redivivius, The Smart Set, March 1921)
Selected Works of Nonfiction by H.L. Mencken:
- H.L. Mencken Prejudices: A Selection, edited by James T. Farrell (Random House, 1955)
- H.L. Mencken: The American Scene, edited by Huntington Cairns (Alfred A. Knopf, 1965)
- Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing (Vintage, 1982)
- H.L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, edited by William N. Nolte (Gateway Editions, 1987)
- The Diary of H.L. Mencken, edited by Charles A. Fecher (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989)
- The Vintage Mencken, edited by Alistair Cooke (Hadley Press, 2007)
