Prejudices, fifth series

VIII FROM THE FILES OF A BOOK REVIEWER, 120 1. Counter-Offensive, 120 2. Heretics, 127 3. The Grove of Academe, 133 4. The Schoolma’m’s Goal, 141 5. The Heroic Age, 146 6. The W...

In the second argument of the abolitionists there is more force, but even here, I believe, the ground under them is very shaky. Their fundamental error consists in assuming that...

A very great man, this Mr. Conrad. As yet, I believe decidedly underestimated, even by many of his post-mortem advocates. Most of his first acclaimers mistook him for a mere rom...

“Mirage,” I daresay, is already forgotten, though it was published only in 1924. In substance, it is the story of Skeeters Kirby’s quest for the Wonder Woman that all sentimenta...

It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton, but I went down there very willingly, for I had good reports of the sub-Potomac bootleggers, and moreover I was...

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that the most portentous phenomenon in the whole history of music was the first public performance of the Eroica on April 7, 1805. The...

Here, of course, I do not venture into the contumacy of criticising; I merely marvel. A student of the sacred sciences all my life, I am well learned in the dogmas and ceremonia...

Thus an actual conflict is joined, and it is the height of absurdity for the Millikans and other such compromisers to seek to evade it with soft words. That conflict was not beg...

I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among the first 200 objectives--200 out of 1581. Nor do I choose them unfairly; most of those that I have not lis...

Yet this Williams, during his long years in Congress, passed in Washington as an intellectual. Cloak-room and barroom gossip credited him with a profound education and very subt...

The remedy? I know of none. Moreover, I do not believe in remedies. So long as the prevailing pedagogues are not found out, and the absurd effort to cram every moron with book-l...

With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to exercise a special and dreadful fascination o...

Behind what is written about painting there is always, of course, the immense amount of drivel that is talked about it. No other art is so copiously discussed by its practitione...

Since the earliest days, as everyone knows, American jurisprudence has been founded upon the axiom that it is the first duty of every citizen to police his neighbors, and especi...

Wendell’s actual books, I believe, are now all dead, even his arbitrary and ignorant but highly amusing “Literary History of America.” His volume on Shakespeare, published in 18...

But I am not arguing here that any such things ought to happen; I am merely calling attention to the fact that, under democracy, it is becoming increasingly difficult for office...

The theory that the ancient Greeks and Romans were men of a vast and ineffable superiority runs aground on the fact that they were great admirers of oratory. No other art was so...

I proceed to another case. One day in the Summer of 1924, during the Republican National Convention at Cleveland, I met an eminent American publicist in a hotel lobby there. He...