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REVIEW
be more literate than most academics and could write far more intelli–
gently about American literature and the American language. He loved
baiting professors, especially heavy-handed moralists like the New Hu–
manists, and in a piece called "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism" he
praised Spingarn's demolition of all the usual academic ways of pigeon–
holing writers, especially troublesome and innovative writers. He attacks
most critics for "their chronic inability to understand all that is most
personal and original and hence most forceful and significant in the
emerging literature of the country." "As practiced by all such learned and
diligent but essentially ignorant and unimaginative men, criticism is little
more than a branch of homiletics." If the writer is "what is called a
'right thinker,' if he devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes
in a sonorous manner, then he is worthy of respect."
Warming to his theme, Mencken writes that "we are, in fact, a na–
tion of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving
and lifting up his fellow citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is
our national disease." Mencken, of course, cannot resist intensifYing, ex–
aggerating; settled into his pulpit, caught up in the swell of his surging
prose, he exemplifies the very evangelism he loves to pillory. Moreover,
although he detests moralism, he cannot accept a purely aesthetic atti–
tude: "Beauty as we know it in this world is by no means the apparition
ill
lJaCllo
that Dr. Spingarn seems to see. It has its social, its political, even
its moral implications.... To denounce moralizing out of hand is to
pronounce a moral judgment."
We remember Mencken the entertainer rather than Mencken the
critic. He had a plain bluff way with books, as with everything he wrote
about, but his mind was never so simple or so eager for effect that it left
no room for qualification. The offensive but fairly routine racism and
anti-Semitism of his post-1930 diaries were contradicted by his actual be–
havior towards blacks and Jews, including his strong patronage of young
black writers. But the serious issues of the Depression plowed Mencken
under, made him seem cranky and irresponsible, and he subsided gracefully
into autobiography, like Edmund Wilson in his final years. As a critic he
had no role to play in the Age of Eliot, when terms like "beauty" and
"sincerity" lost their meaning, and modern literature became
Hemingway, Joyce, and Proust rather than Ibsen, Shaw, and Wells. The
struggle against Victorianism was over; the battle for modernism had
hardly begun.
As Americans became less provincial, more cosmopolitan, Mencken
lost his subject. He has had some imitators but no successors. Perhaps the
many-sided work of Dwight Macdonald came closest. He too was a
sharp critic of language, a witty and destructive polemicist, a brave edi–
tor, a political gadfly, and a ruthless but entertaining mocker of cultural
