It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

Mencken’s remark plays on the cultural stereotype that towering artistic genius is often paired with indifference—or even ineptitude—at fashionable leisure pursuits. By choosing Goethe and Beethoven as emblematic “great men,” and billiards and golf as emblematic middle‑ and upper‑class recreations, he suggests a mismatch between the inward, obsessive discipline of major creative work and the social, game-centered skills prized in polite society. The line also carries Mencken’s characteristic satirical edge: it punctures the tendency to treat well-rounded “all‑around” accomplishment as a universal ideal, implying that extraordinary achievement commonly entails lopsidedness, specialization, and a certain disregard for conventional accomplishments.