H. L. Mencken had a lifetime habit of jotting down iconoclastic notes to himself for use in future essays. Stuffed away and forgotten, they were found shortly before his death early this year and assembled as his final book. Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook (293 pp.; Knopf; $3.95) is a last lusty Bronx cheer at the muscular pessimist of Baltimore. Some samples:
EXPERIENCE is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. A man really learns little by it, for it is narrowly limited in range. What does a faithful husband know of women, or a faithful wife of men? The generalizations of such persons are always inaccurate. What really teaches man is not experience, but observation. It is observation that enables him to make use of the vastly greater experience of other men, of men taken in the mass. He learns by noting what happens to them. Confined to what happens to himself, he labors eternally under an insufficiency of data.
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them, and they try to put him out of their minds. The easiest way to do so is to insist that he keep his place. The Jew suffers from the same cause, but to a much less extent.
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. It is a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism. As for a lawyer, he is simply, under our cash-register civilization, one who teaches scoundrels how to commit their swindles without too much risk. As for a physician, he is one who spends his whole life 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, in large 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.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
Democracy . . . may be tolerable simply because the politicians who operate it are cynics. They never quite believe in the great causes that they merchant to the plain people, nor do they ever quite believe in the infamy of the opposition. The plain people are always outraged when they discover evidences of this tolerance, just as an ignorant litigant is outraged when he sees his lawyer eating lunch with the lawyer of his opponent. But it is precisely such cynicism toward undying doctrines and holy causes that makes civilized life possible in the world.