Irving Babbitt

This volume does not criticize criticism, but criticizes critics. The critics examined are among the most vital and significant personalities of their time. To study Sainte-Beuve and the other leading French critics is to get very close to the intellectual center of the century. Readers my thus follow the main movement of this thought through this period, and build up the necessary background for understanding the ideas of the present day, whether they continue this earlier thought or react from it. The so-called anti-intellectualist movement can only be understood with reference to such a background; it is a reaction from the dogmatic naturalism that reached its height in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the end, the judgment of the keen-sighted few in the present will be ratified by the verdict of posterity.

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