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. 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. What we need in the Tory line is not such ice-bound derelicts but men who are passionate about the past because they find their inspiration there, men and women who belabor the present not for its existence, but because it might have been better if it had been wiser.