It takes a liberal mind to distinguish
between barbarism and progress.
Next there is the _rigor mortis_ of the neo-Egyptians, the barbarism
of the dead hand, called by the unkind and the undiscriminating,
academic barbarism.
Let us humor the Menckenites by so calling it, and then add that
it is by no means confined to the colleges, although it is a vice
more familiar in critics than in creative artists. A Ph.D. is
quite unnecessary in order to be academic in this sense, just as
one does not have to be a scholar in order to be pedantical. To
stand pat in one's thinking (and this is the neo-Egyptian fault)
is to be barbarous, whatever the profession of the thinker. True,
the victims of this hardening of the brain are precisely those men
and women most likely to fling taunts at the moderns, just those
who would rather be charged with immorality than barbarism. And
yet, to be bound to the past is as barbarous in the Greek sense as
to be wholly immersed in the present. The Egyptians for all their
learning were barbarians.
Barbarian is not as rude a word as it sounds. Most of the great
romanticists had strains of the barbarous in them--the young
Shakespeare among them.
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