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PARTISAN REVIEW
"dialogue of the mind with itself." Like Arnold, he turns writers into
cultural emblems, projecting the divisions of his sensibility into an
historical dialectic. He was no practical critic; he never got close to
writers in the intense formal way the New Critics would teach everyone
to do. Despite his fame and influence, his name goes unmentioned in
W.
K. Wimsatt's and Cleanth Brooks's hefty history,
Literary Criticism
(1957). At the end of his essay, "On Creating a Usable Past," Brooks
writes, rather lamely, that "the real task for the American literary histo–
rian ... is not to seek for masterpieces - the few masterpieces are all too
obvious - but for tendencies." Even more than Arnold, he turned criti–
cism into a form of cultural diagnosis, an examination of the national
mind.
H.
L.
Mencken was older than Brooks, but his heyday came after–
ward, when the young men of the twenties devoured
The Americall
Mercury
and lived by his cynicism, wit, and satirical gusto. Mencken was
protean, he was a force of nature. He learned to write not among pale
Harvard aesthetes like Brooks but in the hurly-burly of Baltimore jour–
nalism and at smoke-filled national conventions. If Brooks's weakness was
a poetic vagueness, as if he were sometimes mesmerized by the soulful
flow of his own voice, Mencken's writing was almost too clear and
sharp. Like all great caricaturists, he sacrificed nuance for vivid exaggera–
tion. He could be blunderingly unsubtle, elephantine, ponderously Ger–
manic. But like his master, Shaw, Mencken was never vague, never in
doubt. In a perfectly Shaw-like put-down of the man he calls "The Ul–
ster Polonius," Mencken writes that much as he enjoys reading Shaw's
works, "so far as I know, I never found a single original idea in them."
No, he says, Shaw is an immensely entertaining set of rhetorical tricks.
Shaw is "quick-witted, bold, limber-tongued, persuasive, humorous,
iconoclastic, ingratiating.... It is his life work to announce the obvious
in terms of the scandalous."
In other words, Shaw, like Mencken himself, is a style: a dazzling
high-wire act, an endlessly resourceful iconoclasm: "He has a large and
extremely uncommon capacity for provocative utterance; he knows how
to get a touch of bellicosity into the most banal of doctrines; he is for–
ever on tiptoe, forever challenging, forever
sJorzarldo.
His matter may be
from the public store, even the public junk-shop, but his manner is always
his own. The tune is old, but the words are new."
Mencken was not primarily a critic, although he wrote a great deal
of criticism between 1910 and 1920. But as these scintillating lines on
Shaw demonstrate, Mencken wrote about books with exactly the same
kind of sweeping brush strokes he used to attack politics, morals, and
manners. His portrayal of Shaw, supposedly the most intellectual of
