>On Jul 5,  7:06pm, Barry Crimmins wrote:
>> . . .  that great "humoracist" Van Wyck
>> Brooks.
>
>What did Brooks do to earn the title "humoracist"?
>
>I've never seen him as anything worse than a want-a-be psychiatrist who was
>able to attract an audience and who was able to spark a long-lived debate
>about
>Twain by declaring that "Twain was a frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested
>development[,] . . . the artist . . . had withered into the cynic and the
>whole
>man had become a spiritual valetudinarian." (quoted in Foner's _M.T.: Social
>Critic_, 57)
>
>I won't argue with those who wish to call Brooks names.  I just don't
>understand why "humoracist" is one of the names to call him.  Should I now
>have
>another reason ("humoracism") to be upset with Brooks or is Barry just using
>hyperbole?
>
>(And, please, I didn't include the Brooks quote to renew an 80-year-old debate
>on the Forum.  It's safe to assume that the vast majority of Forum members
>disagree with Brooks' analysis.)

My recollection of Brooks work was that he felt Twain failed to accomplish
what he could have because he wrote humor. He felt that Twain vented his
intellectual steam through humor rather than let it build to an eruption of
genuine intellect.  So I may have been slightly hyperbolic in coining the
term "humoracist" but only slightly.

Barry Crimmins