Henry Louis Mencken

“ Should you meet her the following afternoon in the Prater or on parade in the Kärntnerstrasse, her eyes will look past you, for the night has gone, carrying with it its memories and its intoxications.
It is this spirit of evanescence, this youthful buoyancy, snatched out of the passing years, lived for a moment and then forgot, which constitutes the genuine gaiety of Vienna. It is an unconscious gaiety, sensed but not analysed, in the very soul of the people. It keeps the Viennese young and makes him resent, intuitively, the invasion of other nations to whom gaiety is artificial. ”

“ In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself—that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat? ”

“ A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.
Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. ”

“ For romance and gaiety in London are grafted to an otherwise unromantic and lugubrious hulk. All joys in that terrible city are lugged from overseas, and, in the process of suturing, the spontaneity has been lost, the buoyancy has disappeared, the honesty has vanished.
But no people can be without romance. No nation can withstand forever the engines of repression. Not all the moral lawmakers of England have succeeded in stamping out the natural impulses. Hypocrisy, that great mediator, sits into the game and stacks the cards. There is no more sensuous dining room in the world than the Savoy. ”

“ The proletarian is so artfully relieved of the elemental gnawings which constantly terrorize the peasant and so steadily distracted from all sober thinking that his natural envy of his betters is sublimated into a sort of boozy contentment, like that of a hog in a comfortable sty. He escapes boredom, and with it, brooding. The political imbecilities which pile up in great waves from the prairies break upon the hard rock of his urban cynicism like rollers upon the strand. His pastors have but a slight hold upon him, and so cannot stir him up to the frantic hatreds which move the yokel. ”

“ When a personal office that a man might perform, or even an intelligent machine, is put into the hands of a woman, it is put there simply and solely because the woman can bring charm to it and irradiate it with romance. If, now, she fails to do so—if she brings, not charm, not beauty, not romance, but the gross curves of an aurochs and a voice of brass—if she offers bulk when the heart cries for grace and adenoids when the order is for music, then the whole thing becomes a hissing and a mocking, and a grey fog is on the world. ”

“ The American, loosed in the streets of Paris by night, however sees in himself another and a worldlier image. Into the crevices of his flat house in his now far-away New York have penetrated from time to time vague whisperings of the laxative deviltries, the bold saucinesses of the city by the Seine. And hither has he come, as comes a jack tar to West Street after protracted cruise upon the celibate seas, to smell out, as a very devil of a fellow, quotation-marked life and its attributes. What is romance to such a soul—even were romance, the romance of this Paris, uncurtained to him? ”

“ I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. ”

“ I shall never think again of Vienna without picturing that stranded girl, sipping at her reddish drink in the _Amerikan-bar_ in the Kaisergarten. But her case is typical. The Viennese are not hospitable to strangers. They are an intimate, self-sufficient people.
Let us turn, however, from the little Gabrielle to a more fascinating and exquisite creature, to a happier and more buoyant denizen of Viennese night life, to a lady of more elegant attire. In short, behold Fräulein Bianca Weise. In her are the alkaloids of gaiety. She irradiates the joyfulness of the city. ”

“ The aim of democracy is to break all such free spirits to the common harness. It tries to iron them out, to pump them dry of self-respect, to make docile John Does of them. The measure of its success is the extent to which such men are brought down, and made common. The measure of civilization is the extent to which they resist and survive. Thus the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves. ”

“ He is not compelled to pretend that he is a worse man than he really is. He needn’t hold his nose in order to approach his benefactor. Thus he may go into office without having dealt his honour a fatal wound, and once he is in, he is under no pressure to sacrifice it further, and may nurse it back to health and vigour. His sovereign, at worst, has a certain respect for it, and hesitates to strain it unduly; the mob has no sensitiveness on that point, and, indeed, no knowledge that it exists. The courtier’s sovereign, in other words, is apt to be a man of honour himself. ”

“ I like best the Berlin that sings with the students in the undiscovered, untainted wein and bier stuben of the thitherward thoroughfares, the Berlin that dances in the Joachimstrasse, where the mädels, each to herself a Cecilie, shirtwaisted, poor, happy, kick up their German heels, drink up their German beer, assault the Schweizerkäse and bring back memories of that paradise of all paradises—the Englischer Garten of Munich the Incomparable, the Divine. ”

“ The have-not gains something valuable when he acquires the delusion that he is the equal of his betters. It may not be true—but even a delusion, if it augments the dignity of man, is something. Certain apparent realities grow out of it: the peasant no longer pulls his forelock when he meets the baron, he is free to sue and be sued, he may denounce Huxley as a quack. But the thing, alas, works both ways. As one pan of the scale goes up, the other comes down. If democracy really loves the dignity of man, then it kills the thing it loves. ”

“ Or, despite its appearances, is it truly the gayest city in the world, redolent of romance, bristling with intrigue, polluted with perfume? It is. And, furthermore, it is far gayer than its reputation; for all has never been told. Gaiety in Vienna is an end, not a means. It is born in the blood of the people. The carnival spirit reigns. There are almost no restrictions, no engines of repression. Alongside the real Viennese night life, the blatant and spectacular caprices of Paris are so much tinsel. ”

“ The causes of this are to be sought, without question, in the nature of democracy itself. It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may be stopped by passing a law. The aim of government is to repeal the laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments. War becomes simply a device to end war. The state, a mystical emanation from the mob, takes on a transcendental potency, and acquires the power to make over the father which begat it. ”

“ It is night in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. And the Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies. And up the Champs Elysées the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaves like a million topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with the melody of living. Are you, now far away and deep in the American winter, with me once again in memory over the seas in this warm and wonderful and fugitive world? ”

“ Thus envy comes in; if you overlook it you will never understand democracy, and you will never understand Puritanism. It is not, of course, a speciality of democratic man. It is the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all times and everywhere. But it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy of the state. What the human race owes to the old autocracies, and how little, in these democratic days, it is disposed to remember the debt! ”

“ Just as the worst of Paris came from America, so has the worst of Berlin come from America by way of Paris. The maquereau spirit of Montmartre, with its dollar lust and its poisoned blood, has not yet the throat of this German night city full in its fists; but the fists are tightening slowly—and the voice behind them speaks not French, but the jargon of Broadway. ”