Despite the ironic fact that Mencken himself was then in his late forties, Kennedy sees the opposition as greybeards. 9 Rather Victorian language and imagery, that. There is no reference here to Mencken, yet every paragraph betrays his influence on the Montrealer's prose style. 11 Smith's famous piece in the Canadian Forum in 1928 is good debating rhetoric, in the manner of Mencken. Thrust and parry, ridicule rather than the intellectual analysis he pretends to favour, are the critic's chosen weapons.
Reinforcements are on the way.
Some of Smith's literary criticism is keenly analytical, but he never outgrew his early training in the New Critical gospel of Art as divorced from place and time, 'international' in themes and standards. The single quotes reflect my own conviction that such a goal, such standards, are illusory. 13 Kennedy, conversely, was aware of regional forces as being significant in literature. Only a Canadian Whitman, and by that I mean a man of his genius and spiritual breadth, will correctly interpret the whole Canadian consciousness. 15 Smith's famous separation of literature into cosmopolitan and provincial stems, of course, from the same roots.