But shrewdness is not enough when one is trying to cope with master-ideas, and in their realm Mr. Mencken is, as he might say, a clodhopper. One of the master-ideas in æsthetics and psychology, one that has engaged great minds and been pondered upon each century since the _Poetics_ was introduced into European thought, is the Aristotelian conception of _katharsis_. Hear Mr. Mencken after the sages and the learned have spoken. He is saying that capital punishment affords _katharsis_ to modern societies. “_Katharsis_, so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is _katharsis_. A bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a counterfeit $10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on Sunday, is arrested and jailed. This is also _katharsis_. A subscriber to a newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of a lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not buy Liberty bonds. This again is _katharsis_.”[68] And this again is cheap intellectual vaudeville or--it is clodhopperism. Something like this always happens when Mr. Mencken fingers the diamond ideas of the world; the process of degrading intellectual grandeur to horse sense began when he grossly misunderstood Nietzsche years ago. By way of a last word on this idol of the emancipated Rotarian, do not forget that Mr. Mencken, destructive critic that he is, is also given to fulsome and extravagant praise of certain transient artists. Mr. Edgar Lee Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_, he says, is “the most eloquent, the most profound and the most thoroughly national volume of poetry published in America since _Leaves of Grass_.” Conceivably, it may be the third, but is it eloquent, is it profound? Such judgments are not uncommon when Mr. Mencken feels a praising mood come on. III