Even on the side of mere professional knowledge, the primary material of
his craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep and
direction of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on the
surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the
fossil literature taught in colleges--worse, in high schools. It must be
dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of
what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his
consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge
it of all its remaining validity and significance before adopting it.
This has been true since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a
man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots,
nevertheless remained a _dilettante_ in both aesthetics and metaphysics
to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never
showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything,
was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and
superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is their
somewhat smoky pleasantness.
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