Merit

The literary merit of your composition is undoubted, but you are wrong in your facts.  The most beautiful thing in the world is Beethoven's symphony in F major, No. 7.  The ugliest is a crayon portrait.  Art is always superior to nature. It would be a poor artist who could not beat the Creator, assuming the conditions of the bout to be anything approaching even.  The human body is a fearful botch, not only aesthetically, but even mechanically.  An optician who would make an optical instrument as imperfect as the eye would be handed over to the common hangman.  The best nature can do is to follow art at a distance of ten paces.  On second thoughts, change the Beethoven No. 7 to Schubert's trio for piano, violin and cello, opus 100, or, at all events, the slow movement.  On third thoughts change it to the andante of Schubert's C major symphony. On fourth thoughts, change it to the last three minutes of Richard Strauss' "Tod and Verklärung".  On fifth thoughts, change it to the minuet in Mozart's Jupiter.  On sixth thoughts--but you can see by now what a lead art has got.

--H.L. Mencken, April 18, 1917 (est)
Letter to Virginia Dashiell

Virginia Dashiell was one of Mencken's favorites on the Sun staff. The year before he mailed this rallying note about a piece of hers, he had given her a copy of The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzche with, on the title page, his caricature of himself kneeling humbly before her.


Source: "The New Mencken Letters" edited by Carl Bode, p. 72