Monday, June 09, 2014
The Pursuit of Incompetents
William M. Calder III, "Sterling Dow," Gnomon 68 (1996) 572-574 (at 573):
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He had no patience with incompetence or pretension and was often victim of his own integrity. Epigraphy was clean and straightforward. One could control all the evidence available, read all the secondary literature, and make an irrefutable conclusion that carried knowledge forward. It did not allow fraud.
The other side was his detestation of literary criticism, which he considered the pursuit of incompetents who in the end did little more than impose personal prejudices under the guise of scholarship. His contempt for his literary colleagues was undisguised and requited.
