276
the paleontologists Cope and
Marsh, for example, locked horns
together, on a field strewn with
ossements fossiles,
quite in the
manner of the great industrial Cer–
ddae of the period-Gould or
Frick or Harriman. But the older
type was tough too, and generally
speaking it preserved its status and
held its lines well into our own
era: it yielded, or has all but yield–
ed now, only before the brisk on–
rush of the new type, the type be–
gotten (under Harding and Cool–
idge) by the New Capitalism and
brought to perfection (under
Roosevelt) by the later forms of
Free Enterprise. The representative
scholar of our decade is-not a
Cabot or a Livingston-but an
Eric Johnston in cap and gown.
None of the definitive characters
are m1ssmg: the veneration of
quantity, the lust of the tangible,
the mental ingenuousness, the pas–
sion for organizational machinery,
the instinct for the immediate and
the solidly visible, and (to put it
negatively) the contempt for ideas,
the hatred of literature and the arts,
the fear of criticism, and (singular
as it sounds) the distrust of learn–
ing itself. Philistinism, obscuran–
tism, anti-intellectualism -
these
are as truly the stamps of the suc–
cessful academician as of the suc–
cessful entrepreneur. I remember
giving voice, a good many years
ago, in the presence of an emi–
nent American historian, to what
was probably some very callow cri–
ticism
of a certain scholar as defi–
cient in ideas. "Ideas!" exclaimed
the eminent historian. "Ideas, in–
deed. There are far too many
PARTISAN REVIEW
ideas
on the loose in this country
as it
is."
I had not thought, to tell
the truth, that our intellectual life
was quite so intense or quite so
menacing as that; but this excel–
lent teacher, whose own consider–
able reputation was based on at
least one idea, spoke-as I later
learned-for the growing majority
of his colleagues.
We are all colleagues of his, how–
ever inconspicuous, and it behooves
us to look into our own hearts as
well as round about us while we
speak. This sober thought ought
not to silence or embarrass us, how–
ever. And I can perhaps most con–
cretely illustrate these remarks by
reference to certain developments
in my own "field"-for of course
I have one-the field, as sales–
managers woul d say, or "territory,"
of American literature. About
twenty-five years ago, it was dis–
covered that this large and popu–
lous (if not always "exclusive")
territory had gone, until then, vir–
tually untapped: it was a market
that had simply not been opened
up, in any big way, and once this
word had gone round, the prospec–
tors poured in, first in a tiny trickle,
then in a swelling stream, and at
length in a wild current that
threatened to become an inunda–
tion. "What a rich mine of thesis–
subjects!" said one highly-trained
woman scholar to me with a little
natural envy-though her own
fiel d was a very lucrative one–
and in fact she was quite right:
the thesis-subjects have not yet
been exhausted, though the very
best pickings have by this time
been pretty well combed over.
