Art & Creativity Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s jab lands because it’s engineered as a sacrilege: he drags “opera,” that most self-anointed of high arts, out of the incense haze and into the red-light district. The simile is obscene on purpose. A cathedral suggests reverence, community, and moral elevation; a bawdy house suggests paid performance, appetite, and a transaction dressed up as intimacy. Mencken isn’t claiming opera is simply “immoral.” He’s accusing it of being counterfeit sanctity - a place where people go to be seen having refined feelings, buying cultural absolution by the ticket.

The line also turns on a sneaky reversal. Opera is supposedly music at its most exalted, yet Mencken treats it as music’s corrupted cousin: excessive, perfumed, theatrical to the point of dishonesty. The subtext is anti-pretension more than anti-melody. He’s mocking the social ritual around opera - the gowns, the boxes, the status choreography - as a kind of respectable vice. Pleasure is allowed, even encouraged, as long as it wears pearls and calls itself art.

Context matters: Mencken made a career of puncturing American pieties, from politics to religion to bourgeois “culture.” In the early 20th century, opera functioned as a marker of assimilation and class legitimacy, especially in big cities. Mencken’s insult is a class critique in dirty disguise: the elite build cathedrals out of taste, then sneak into them to indulge. The scandal is the point; the accuracy is optional.