H. L. Mencken
[Sun (E), 1925-02-16, 15:4]
[In the original article heading “III” appears twice. This has been corrected here.]
Some time ago, writing in this place about the Baltimore of the eighties, I permitted myself an eloquent passage upon its charm, and let fall the doctrine that that charm had vanished [1]. Mere rhetoric, I fear. The old charm, in fact, still survives, despite the boomers, despite the street-wideners, despite the forward-lookers, despite all the other dull frauds who try to destroy it. I am never more conscious of it than when I return to the city after a week in New York. There is a great city, huge, rich and eminent, and yet it has no more charm than a circus lot or a jazzy hotel. Coming back to Baltimore is like coming out of a football crowd into quiet communion with a fair one who is also amiable, and has the gift of consolation for hard-beset and despairing men.
I have confessed to rhetoric, but here I surely do not indulge in it. For twenty-four years I have resisted almost constant temptation to move to New York, and I resist it more easily today than I did when it began. I am, perhaps, the most arduous commuter ever heard of, even in that town of commuters. My office is on Manhattan island and has been there since 1914; yet I live, vote and have my being in Baltimore, and come back here the instant my job allows. If my desk bangs at 3 P. M., I leap for the 3.25 train. Four long hours follow, but the first is the worst. My back, at all events, is toward New York! Behind lies a place fit only for the gross business of getting money; ahead is a place made for enjoying it.I am not speaking here of the poor (God knows how they exist in New York at all!); I am speaking of the well-to-do, even of the rich. The very richest man, in New York, is never quite sure that the house he lives in now will be his next year—that he will be able to resist the constant pressure of business expansion and rising land values. I have known actual millionaires to be chased out of their homes in this way, and forced into apartments. Here, in Baltimore, of course, the same pressure exists, but it is not oppressive, for the householder can meet it by yielding to it halfway. It may force him into the suburbs, even into the adjacent country [sic.], but he is still in direct contact with the city, sharing in its life, and wherever he lands he may make a stand. But on Manhattan island he is quickly brought up by the rivers, and once he has crossed them he may as well move to Syracuse or Trenton.
Nine times out of ten he tries to avoid crossing them. That is, he moves into meaner quarters on the island itself, and pays more for them. His house gives way to a large flat—one offering the same room for his goods and chattels that his house offered. Next year he is in a smaller flat, and half of his goods and chattels have vanished. A few years more, and he is in three or four rooms. Finally, he lands in a hotel. At this point he ceases to exist as the head of a house. His quarters are precisely like the quarters of 50,000 other men. The front he presents to the world is simply an anonymous door on a gloomy corridor. Inside, he lives like a sardine in a can.
Such a habitation, it must be plain, cannot be called a home. A home is not a mere transient shelter; its essence lies in its permanence, in its capacity for accretion and solidification, in its quality of representing, in all its details, the personalities of the people who live in it. In the course of years it becomes a sort of museum of those people; they give it its indefinable air, separating it from all other homes, as one human face is separated from all others. It is at once a refuge from the world, a treasure house, a castle, and the shrine of a whole hierarchy of peculiarly private and potent gods.
This concept of the home cannot survive the mode of life that prevails in New York. I have seen it go to pieces under my eyes in the houses of my own friends. The intense crowding in the town, and the restlessness and unhappiness that go with it, make it almost impossible for anyone to accumulate the materials of a home—the trivial, fortuitous and often grotesque things that gather around a family, as glories and debts gather around a state. The New Yorker lacks the room to house them; he thus learns to live without them. In the end he is a stranger in the house he lives in. More and more, it tends to be no more than Job No. 16,432b from this or that decorator’s studio. I know one New Yorker, a man of considerable means, who moves every three years. Every time he moves his wife sells the entire contents of the apartment she is leaving, and employs a decorator to outfit the new one.
To me, at all events, such a mode of living would be unendurable. The charm of getting home, as I see it, is the charm of getting back to what is inextricably my own—to things familiar and long loved, to things that belong to me alone and none other. I have lived in one house for 40 years. It has changed in that time, as I have—but somehow it still remains the same. No conceivable decorator’s masterpiece could give me the same ease. It is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it, I’d be as certainly crippled as if I lost both legs.
I believe that this feeling for the hearth, for the immemorial lares and penates, is infinitely stronger here than in New York—that it has better survived here, indeed, than in any other large city of America—and that its persistence accounts for the superior charm of the town. There are, of course, thousands of Baltimoreans in flats—but I know of none to whom a flat seems more than a makeshift, a substitute, a necessary and temporary evil. They are all planning to get out, to find house-room in one of the new suburbs, to resume living in a home. What they see about them is too painfully not theirs. The New Yorker has simply lost that discontent. He is a vagabond. His notions of the agreeable become those of a vaudeville actor. He takes on the shallowness and unpleasantness of any other homeless man. He is highly sophisticated, and inordinately trashy.
The fact explains the lack of charm that one finds in his town; the fact that the normal Baltimorean is almost his exact antithesis explains the charm that is here. Human relations, in such a place as this, tend to assume a solid permanence. A man’s circle of friends becomes a sort of extension of his family circle. His contacts are with men and women who are rooted as he is. They are not moving all the time, and so they are not changing their friends all the time. Thus abiding relationships tend to be built up, and when fortune brings unexpected changes they survive those changes. The men I know and esteem in Baltimore are, on the whole, men I have known and esteemed a long while; even those who have come into my ken relatively lately seem likely to last. But of the men I knew best when I first began going to New York, twenty-five years ago, not one is a friend today. Of those I knew best ten years ago, not six are friends today. The rest have got lost in the riot, and the friends of today, I sometimes fear, will get lost in the same way.
In human relationships that are so casual there is seldom any satisfaction. It is our fellows who make life endurable to us, and give it a purpose and a meaning; if our contacts with them are light and frivolous, there is something lacking, and it is something of the very first importance. What I contend is that in Baltimore, under a slow-moving and cautious social organization, such contacts are more enduring than elsewhere, and that life in consequence is more charming. Of the external embellishments of life we have a plenty—as great a supply, indeed, to any rational taste, as New York itself. But we have something much better: we have a tradition of sound and comfortable living. A Baltimorean is not merely John Doe, an isolated individual of Homo sapiens, exactly like every other John Doe. He is John Doe of a certain place—of Baltimore, of a definite home in Baltimore. It was not by accident that all the people of the Western world, very early in their history, began distinguishing their best men by adding of this or that place to their names.
1. Possibly a reference to “Advice to Boomers”, Sun (E), 1923-04-30, p. 17, “Within the span of my own life, all the traditional charms of the town have vanished, from the charms that went with its more ancient picturesqueness to the charm that went with its old name for gayety and good living.”