Indeed, much may be said for sound
barbarian literature, until it becomes self-conscious, though not
much for barbarian criticism. Nevertheless, I do not intend in
this sally against the slavish barbarism of the merely academic
mind to hurl the epithet recklessly. Lusty conservatives who
attack free verse, free fiction, ultra realism, "jazzed" prose,
and the socialistic drama as the diseases of the period have my
respect and sympathy, when it is a disease and not change as
change that they are attacking. And, often enough, these
manifestations _are_ symptoms of disease, a plethoric disease
arising from too high blood pressure. Hard-hitting conservatives
were never more needed in literature than now, when any one can
print anything that is novel, and find some one to approve of it.
But there are too many respectable barbarians among our American
conservatives who write just what they wrote twenty years ago, and
like just what they liked twenty years ago, because that is their
nature. In 1600 they would have done the same for 1579. Without
question men were regretting in 1600 the genius of the youthful
Shakespeare of the '80's, later quenched by commercialism (see the
appeals to the pit and the topical references in "Hamlet"); and
good conservatives were certainly regretting the sad course of the
drama which, torn from the scholars and flung to the mob, had
become mad clowning.
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