Word: babbittism
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This morning the Vagabond is sick unto death of culture. The Cantabrigian mists, swirling their gyral shapes about the familiar tower, serve as an ethereal transport for his soul, and carry it to far climes. There, the allusions of Professor Babbitt forgotten, the Vagabond recalls an author he once read, a febrile man, Edger Rice Burroughs by name. As the memory returns, he hears the scream of a gorilla, charmingly uncultured. Then, all around him, swarming from the trees, comes a clan of the great apes. The vagabond sits in their midst, learning tricks that neither Burroughs nor his familiars...
...Christianity almost to the point of identification, he has fallen into the error common to 'scientific' history of sociology, for which religion is religion (that is, simply one of the colossal self-delusions of the race). This misconception is, of course, one of the modern errors against which Professor Babbitt has carried on a life-long crusade...
...civilization he was a romancer and writer of romantic verse of the also-ran variety. The unromantic world, which dampens many high enthusiasms, turned his to hate. Because he was a good hater and because he gave a name to two U. S. phenomena- Main Street and Babbitt-that were crying for a name, the public finally applauded him and prizes came his way. But Sinclair Lewis is still, as he has always been, a romantic, an enthusiast. Though cynics say that if you want sympathy you had better look for it in the dictionary, Author Lewis is a passionate...
This is one of those novels of which Mr. Rupert Hughes would say, as he did in his introduction to "Babbitt," that the author has so portrayed his subject that the reader says: "There, but for the grace of God, go I." Of course this is utterly wrong, for no reader identifies himself with the hero-cad to that degree, nor is the hero, who is as mentally inert as either of these, ever mirrored from life; vile cads and pure heroes do not occur full-blown in life. The characterization strikes one as incomplete and unreal for that very...
...question of freedom of teaching is one rooted in every soil. Tennessee is concerned: so, recently, was New York. In Professor Irving Babbitt's essay on "Academic Leisure" still an other more indirect please of the subject is lighted up. In mentioning words of such universal importance. President Butler assumed a responsibility to contribute something to one side of the other. As he remarks. "Universities are from time to time denounced as nurseries of revolution by these who are quite unable to comprehend what freedom to seek the truth really means and involves." He proceeds to defend the implications...