H.L. Mencken is actually the coiner, as it were, of the term “Palo Alto Process”. He was not, as some believe, talking about how long it takes to install, or get the proper permits if one wants to install, the bath tub, which incidentally was invented here, by Jane Stanford, when Leland Junior was 3 years old, at the Old Barn, which is now very fittingly a children’s hospital, with free McDonalds Hamburgers as well, poor dears.
I thought of this today, I head read Mencken some years ago, as at undergrad, at Dartmouth, with James Melville Cox, who used to play stud poker with the great columnist, because of a local pundit writing in our paper of record, the electronic probably not the pulp one.
But he paraphrased H.L, which is not easy to do. He said HL said:
Every problem has a simple solution. But it is probably, like drinking bath water towards the end of the week, wrong.
What the Baltimore Booya actually said was:
there
is always a well-known solution to every human
problem neat, plausible, and wrong.
IV. THE DIVINE AFFLATUS
THE suave and cedematous Chesterton, in a late
effort to earn the honorarium of a Chicago
newspaper, composed a thousand words of
labored counterblast to what is called inspiration in
the arts. The thing itself, he argued, has little if any
actual existence; we hear so much about it because
its alleged coyness and fortuitousness offer a con-
venient apology for third-rate work. The man taken
in such third-rate work excuses himself on the ground
that he is a helpless slave of some power that stands
outside him, and is quite beyond his control. On
days when it favors him he teems with ideas and
creates masterpieces, but on days when it neglects him
he is crippled and impotent a fiddle without a bow,
an engine without steam, a tire without air. All
this, according to Chesterton, is nonsense. A man
who can really write at all, or paint at all, or compose
at all should be able to do it at almost any time, pro-
vided only “he is not drunk or asleep.”
So far Chesterton. The formula of the argument
is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all
that is necessary is to deny that it exists. But there
are plenty of men, I believe, who find themselves
unable to resolve the difficulty in any such cavalier
manner men whose chief burden and distinction,
in fact, is that they do not employ formulae in their
thinking, but are thrown constantly upon industry,
ingenuity and the favor of God. Among such men
there remains a good deal more belief in what is
vaguely called inspiration. They know by hard ex-
perience that there are days when their ideas flow
freely and clearly, and days when they are dammed
up damnably. Say a man of that sort has a good
day. For some reason quite incomprehensible to him all his mental processes take on an amazing ease and slickness. Almost without conscious effort
he solves technical problems that have badgered him
for weeks. He is full of novel expedients, extraor-
dinary efficiencies, strange cunnings. He has a
feeling that he has suddenly and unaccountably broken
through a wall, dispersed a fog, got himself out of
the dark. So he does a double or triple stint of the
best work that he is capable of maybe of far better
work than he has ever been capable of before and
goes to bed impatient for the morrow. And on the
morrow he discovers to his consternation that he has
become almost idiotic, and quite incapable of any
work at all.
I challenge any man who trades in ideas to deny
that he has this experience. The truth is that he has
it constantly. It overtakes poets and contrapuntists,
critics and dramatists, philosophers and journalists;
it may even be shared, so far as I know, by advertise-
ment writers, chautauqua orators and the rev. clergy.
The characters that all anatomists of melancholy mark
in it are the irregular ebb and flow of the tides, and
the impossibility of getting them under any sort of
rational control. The brain, as it were, stands to one
side and watches itself pitching and tossing, full of
agony but essentially helpless. Here the man of
creative imagination pays a ghastly price for all his
superiorities and immunities; nature takes revenge
upon him for dreaming of improvements in the scheme
of things. Sitting there in his lonely room, gnawing
the handle of his pen, racked by his infernal quest,
horribly bedevilled by incessant flashes of itching,
toothache, eye-strain and evil conscience thus tor-
tured, he makes atonement for his crime of being
intelligent. The normal man, the healthy and honest
man, the good citizen and householder this man, I
daresay, knows nothing of all that travail. It is
reserved especially for artists and metaphysicians.
It is the particular penalty of those who pursue strange
butterflies into dark forests, and go fishing in en-
chanted and forbidden streams.
Let us, then, assume that the fact is proved: the
nearest poet is a witness to it. But what of the under-
lying mystery? How are we to account for that
puckish and inexplicable rise and fall of inspiration?
My questions, of course, are purely rhetorical. Ex-
planations exist; they have existed for all time; there
is always a well-known solution to every human
problem neat, plausible, and wrong. The ancients,
in the case at bar, laid the blame upon the gods:
sometimes they were remote and surly, and sometimes
they were kind. In the Middle Ages lesser powers
took a hand in the matter, and so one reads of works
of art inspired by Our Lady, by the Blessed Saints,
by the souls of the departed, and even by the devil.
.In our own day there are explanations less super-
natural but no less fanciful to wit, the explanation
that the whole thing is a matter of pure chance, and
not to be resolved into any orderly process to wit,
the explanation that the controlling factor is external
circumstance, that the artist happily married to a
dutiful wife is thereby inspired finally, to make an
end, the explanation that it is all a question of Freu-
dian complexes, themselves lurking in impenetrable
shadows. But all of these explanations fail to satisfy
the mind that is not to be put off with mere words.
Some of them are palpably absurd; others beg the
question. The problem of the how remains, even
when the problem of the why is disposed of. What
is the precise machinery whereby the cerebrum is
bestirred to such abnormal activity on one day that
it sparkles and splutters like an arclight, and reduced
to such feebleness on another day that it smokes and
gutters like a tallow dip?
In this emergency, having regard for the ages-long
and unrelieved sufferings of artists great and small,
I offer a new, simple, and at all events not ghostly
solution. It is supported by the observed facts, by
logical analogies and by the soundest known prin-
ciples of psychology, and so I present it without apolo-
gies. It may be couched, for convenience, in the
following brief terms: that inspiration, so-called, is
a function of metabolism, and that it is chiefly con-
ditioned by the state of the intestinal flora in larger
words, that a man’s flow of ideas is controlled and
determined, both quantitatively and qualitatively, not
by the whims of the gods, nor by the terms of his armis-
tice with his wife, nor by the combinations of some
transcendental set of dice, but by the chemical content
of the blood that lifts itself from his liver to his brain,
and that this chemical content is established in his
digestive tract, particularly south of the pylorus. A
man may write great poetry when he is drunk, when
he is cold and miserable, when he is bankrupt, when
he has a black eye, when his wife glowers at him
across the table, when his children lie dying of
smallpox; he may even write it during an earthquake,
or while crossing the English channel, or in the midst
of a Methodist revival, or in New York. But I am so
far gone in materialism that I am disposed to deny
flatly and finally, and herewith do deny flatly and
finally, that there has lived a poet in the whole history
of the world, ancient or modern, near or far, who
ever managed to write great poetry, or even passably
fair and decent poetry, at a time when he was suffer-
ing from stenosis at any point along the thirty-foot
via dolorosa running from the pylorus to the sigmoid
flexure. In other words, when he was
But perhaps I had better leave your medical adviser
to explain. After all, it is not necessary to go any
further in this direction; the whole thing may be
argued in terms of the blood stream and the blood
stream is respectable, as the duodenum is an outcast.
It is the blood and the blood only, in fact, that the
cerebrum is aware of; of what goes on elsewhere it
can learn only by hearsay. If all is well below, then
the blood that enters the brain through the internal
carotid is full of the elements necessary to bestir the
brain-cells to their highest activity; if, on the contrary,
anabolism and katabolism are going on ineptly, if the
blood is not getting the supplies that it needs and not
getting rid of the wastes that burden it, then the brain-
cells will be both starved and poisoned, and not all
the king’s horses and all the king’s men can make
them do their work with any show of ease and effi-
ciency. In the first case the man whose psyche dwells
in the cells will have a moment of inspiration that
is, he will find it a strangely simple and facile matter
to write his poem, or iron out his syllogism, or make
his bold modulation from F sharp minor to G major,
or get his flesh-tone, or maybe only perfect his swindle.
But in the second case he will be stumped and help-
less. The more he tries, the more vividly he will be
conscious of his impotence. Sweat will stand out in
beads upon his brow, he will fish patiently for the
elusive thought, he will try coaxing and subterfuge,
he will retire to his ivory tower, he will tempt the
invisible powers with black coffee, tea, alcohol and
the alkaloids, he may even curse God and invite death
but he will not write his poem, or iron out his syl-
logism, or find his way into C major, or get his flesh-
tone, or perfect his swindle.
Fix your eye upon this hypothesis of metabolic
inspiration, and at once you will find the key to many
a correlative mystery. For one thing, it quickly ex-
plains the observed hopelessness of trying to pump
up inspiration by mere hard industry the essential
imbecility of the 1,000 words a day formula. Let
there be stenosis below, and not all the industry of a
Hercules will suffice to awaken the lethargic brain.
Here, indeed, the harder the striving, the worse the
stagnation as every artist knows only too well. And
why not? Striving in the face of such an interior
obstacle is the most cruel of enterprises a business
more nerve-wracking and exhausting than reading a
newspaper or watching a bad play. The pain thus
produced, the emotions thus engendered, react upon
the liver in a manner scientifically displayed by Dr.
George W. Crile in his “Man: An Adaptive Mechan-
ism,” and the result is a steady increase in the intes-
tinal demoralization, and a like increase in the pollu-
tion of the blood. In the end the poor victim comes
to a familiar pass; beset on the one hand by impo-
tence and on the other hand by an impatience grown
pathological, he gets into a state indistinguishable
from the frantic. It is at such times that creative
artists suffer most atrociously. It is then that they
writhe upon the sharp spears and red-hot hooks of
a jealous and unjust Creator for their invasion of
His monopoly. It is then that they pay a grisly super-
tax upon their superiority to the great herd of law-
abiding and undistinguished men. The men of this
herd never undergo any comparable torture ; the agony
of the artist is quite beyond their experience and even
beyond their imagination. No catastrophe that could
conceivably overtake a lime and cement dealer, a
curb broker, a lawyer, a plumber or a Presbyterian
is to be mentioned in the same breath with the torments
that, to the most minor of poets, are familiar incidents
of his professional life, and, to such a man as Poe,
or Beethoven, or Brahms, are the commonplaces of
every day. Beethoven suffered more during the
composition of the Fifth symphony than all the judges
on the supreme benches of the world have suffered
jointly since the time of the Gerousia.
Again, my hypothesis explains the fact that inspira-
tion, save under extraordinary circumstances, is never
continuous for more than a relatively short period.
A banker, a barber or a manufacturer of patent medi-
cines does his work day after day without any notice-
able rise or fall of efficiency; save when he is drunk,
jailed or ill in bed the curve of his achievement is
flattened out until it becomes almost a straight line.
But the curve of an artist, even of the greatest of
artists, is frightfully zig-zagged. There are moments
when it sinks below the bottom of the chart, and im-
mediately following there may be moments when it
threatens to run off the top. Some of the noblest
passages written by Shakespeare are in his worst plays,
cheek by jowl with padding and banality; some of
the worst music of Wagner is in his finest music
dramas. There is, indeed, no such thing as a flawless
masterpiece. Long labored, it may be gradually en-
riched with purple passages the high inspirations of
widely separated times crowded together , but even
so it will remain spotty, for those purple passages will
be clumsily joined, and their joints will remain as ap-
parent as so many false teeth. Only the most ele-
mentary knowledge of psychology is needed to show
the cause of the zig-zagging that I have mentioned.
It lies in the ‘elemental fact that the chemical consti-
tution of the blood changes every hour, almost every
minute. What it is at the beginning of digestion is
not what it is at the end of digestion, and in both
cases it is enormously affected by the nature of the
substances digested. No man, within twenty-four
hours after eating a meal in a Pennsylvania Railroad
dining-car, could conceivably write anything worth
reading. A tough beefsteak, I daresay, has ditched
many a promising sonnet, and bad beer, as every one
knows, has spoiled hundreds of sonatas. Thus in-
spiration rises and falls, and even when it rises twice
to the same height it usually shows some qualitative
difference there is the inspiration, say, of Spring
vegetables and there is the inspiration of Autumn
fruits. In a long work the products of greatly differ-
ing inspirations, of greatly differing streams of blood,
are hideously intermingled, and the result is the in-
evitable spottiness that I have mentioned. No one
but a maniac argues that “Die Meistersinger” is all
good. One detects in it days when Wagner felt, as
the saying goes, like a fighting cock, but one also
detects days when he arose in the morning full of
acidosis and despair days when he turned heavily
from the Pierian spring to castor oil.
Moreover, it must be obvious that the very condi-
tions under which works of art are produced tend to
cause great aberrations in metabolism. The artist
is forced by his calling to be a sedentary man. Even
a poet, perhaps the freest of artists, must spend a
good deal of time bending over a desk. He may con-
ceive his poems in the open air, as Beethoven conceived
his music, but the work of reducing them to actual
words requires diligent effort in camera. Here it
is a sheer impossibility for him to enjoy the ideal
hygienic conditions which surround the farmhand, the
curb-broker and the sailor. His viscera are con-
gested; his eyes are astrain; his muscles are without
necessary exercise. Furthermore, he probably
breathes bad air and goes without needed sleep. The
result is inevitably some disturbance of metabolism,
with a vitiated blood supply and a starved cerebrum.
One is always surprised to encounter a poet who is
ruddy and stout; the standard model is a pale and
flabby stenotic, kept alive by patent medicines. So
with the painter, the musical composer, the sculptor,
the artist in prose. There is no more confining work
known to man than instrumentation. The composer
who has spent a day at it is invariably nervous and ill.
For hours his body is bent over his music-paper, the
while his pen engrosses little dots upon thin lines.
I have known composers, after a week or so of such
labor, to come down with auto-intoxication in its most
virulent forms. Perhaps the notorious ill health
of Beethoven, and the mental break-downs of Schu-
mann, Tschaikowsky and Hugo Wolf had their origin
in this direction. It is difficult, going through the history of music, to find a single composer in the
grand manner who was physically and mentally up to
par.
I do not advance it as a formal corollary, but no
doubt this stenosis hypothesis also throws some light
upon two other immemorial mysteries, the first being
the relative aesthetic sterility of women, and the other
being the low aesthetic development of certain whole
classes, and even races of men, e. g., the Puritans, the
Welsh and the Confederate Americans. That women
suffer from stenosis far more than men is a common-
place of internal medicine; the weakness is chiefly to
blame, rather than the functional peculiarities that
they accuse, for their liability to headache. A good
many of them, in fact, are habitually in the state of
health which, in the artist, is accompanied by an utter
inability to work. This state of health, as I have said,
does not inhibit all mental activity. It leaves the
powers of observation but little impaired; it does
not corrupt common sense; it is not incompatible
with an intelligent discharge of the ordinary duties
of life. Thus a lime and cement dealer, in the
midst of it, may function almost as well as when
his metabolic processes are perfectly normal, and
by the same token a woman chronically a victim
to it may yet show all the sharp mental competence
which characterizes her sex. But here the thing
stops. To go beyond to enter the realm of
constructive thinking, to abandon the mere application
of old ideas and essay to invent new ideas, to precip-
itate novel and intellectual concepts out of the chaos
of memory and perception this is quite impossible
to the stenotic. Ergo, it is unheard of among classes
and races of men who feed grossly and neglect per-
sonal hygiene; the pill-swallower is the only artist
in such groups. One may thus argue that the elder
Beecham saved poetry in England, as the younger
Beecham saved music. . . . But, as I say, I do not
stand behind the hypothesis in this department, save,
perhaps, in the matter of women. I could amass
enormous evidences in favor of it, but against them
there would always loom the disconcerting contrary
evidence of the Bulgarians. Among them, I suppose,
stenosis must be unknown but so are all the fine arts.
“La force et la foiblesse de 1’esprit,” said Roche-
foucauld, “sont mal nominees; elles ne sont, en effect,
que la bonne ou la mauvaise des organes du corps.”
Science wastes itself hunting in the other direction.
We are flooded with evidences of the effects of the
mind on the bodv, and so our attention is diverted
from the enormously greater effects of the body en the
mind. It is rather astonishing that the Wassermann
reaction has not caused the latter to be investigated
more thoroughly. The first result of the general em-
ployment of that great diagnostic device was the dis-
covery that thousands of cases of so-called mental
disease were really purely physical in origin that
thousands of patients long supposed to have been
crazed by seeing ghosts, by love, by grief, or by re-
verses in the stock-market were actually victims of the
small but extremely enterprising spirochaete pallida.
The news heaved a bomb into psychiatry, but it has
so far failed to provoke a study of the effects of other
such physical agents. Even the effects of this one
agent remain to be inquired into at length. One now
knows that it mav cause insanitv, but what of the
lesser mental aberrations that it produces? Some of
these aberrations may be actually beneficial. That
is to say, the mild toxemia accompanying the less
virulent forms of infection may stimulate the brain
to its highest functioning, and so give birth to what
is called genius a state of mind long recognized, by
popular empiricism, as a sort of half-way station on
the road to insanity. Beethoven, Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer suffered from such mild toxemias, and
there is not the slightest doubt that their extraordinary
mental activity was at least partly due to the fact.
That tuberculosis, in its early stages, is capable of the
same stimulation is a commonplace of observation.
The consumptive may be weak physically, but he is
usually very alert mentally. The history of the arts,
in fact, shows the names of hundreds of inspired con-
sumptives.
Here a physical infirmity produces a -result that is
beneficial, just as another physical infirmity, the
stenosis aforesaid, produces a result that is baleful.
The artist often oscillates horribly between the two
effects; he is normally anything but a healthy animal.
Perfect health, indeed, is a boon that very few men
above the rank of clodhoppers ever enjoy. What
health means is a degree of adaptation to the organ-
ism’s environment so nearly complete that there is no
irritation. Such a state, it must be obvious, is not
often to be observed in organisms of the highest com-
plexity. It is common, perhaps, in the earthworm.
This elemental beast makes few demands upon its
environment, and is thus subject to few diseases. It
seldom gets out of order until the sands of its life
are run, and then it suffers one grand illness and dies
forthwith. But man is forever getting out of order,
for he is enormously complicated and the higher
he rises in complexity, the more numerous and the
more serious are his derangements. There are whole
categories of diseases, e. g. 9 neurasthenia and hay-
fever, that afflict chiefly the more civilized and delicate
ranks of men, leaving the inferior orders unscathed.
Good health in man, indeed, is almost invariably a
function of inferiority. A professionally healthy
man, e. g., an acrobat, an osteopath or an ice-wagon
driver, is always stupid. In the Greece of the great
days the athletes we hear so much about were mainly
slaves. Not One of the eminent philosophers, poets or
statesmen of Greece was a good high-jumper. Nearly
all of them, in fact, suffered from the same malaises
which afflict their successors of to-day, as you will
quickly discern by examining their compositions.
The aesthetic impulse, like the thirst for truth, might
almost be called a disease. It seldom if ever ap-
pears in a perfectly healthy man.
But we must take the aloes with the honey. The
artist suffers damnably, but there is compensation in
his dreams. Some of his characteristic diseases
cripple him and make his whole life a misery, but
there are others that seem to help him. Of the latter,
the two that I have mentioned carry with them concepts
of extreme obnoxiousness. Both are infections, and
one is associated in the popular mind with notions
or gross immorality. But these concepts of obnox-
iousness should not blind us to the benefits that appar-
ently go with the maladies. There are, in fact, mala-
dies much more obnoxious, and they carry no com-
pensating benefits. Cancer is an example. Perhaps
the time will come when the precise effects of these
diseases will be worked out accurately, and it will
be possible to gauge in advance their probable influ-
ence upon this or that individual. If that time ever
comes the manufacture of artists will become a
feasible procedure, like the present manufacture of
soldiers, capons, right-thinkers and doctors of philos-
ophy. In those days the promising young men of
the race, instead of being protected from such diseases
at all hazards, will be deliberately infected with them,
as soils are now inoculated with nitrogen-liberating
bacteria. … At the same time, let us hope, some
progress will be made against stenosis. It is, after
all, simply a question of technique, like the artificial
propagation of the race by the device of Dr. Jacques
Loeb. The poet of the future, come upon a period
of doldrums, will not tear his hair in futile agony.
Instead, he will go to the nearest clinic, and there get
his rasher of Bulgarian bacilli, or an injection of
some complex organic compound out of a ductless
gland, or an order on a masseur, or a diet list, or
perchance a barrel of Russian oil.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 