There is an invariable tendency among inferior men to magnify their own importance and puissance by organizing a party....My belief is that such parties never accomplish anything valuable. They fall inevitably into the hands of crooked and self-seeking men, and in a little while they are full of obviously dubious doctrines. All of them attempt to discipline their members....The literature of the world is not written by such joiners. It is the exclusive product of independent men. One of their chief marks, indeed, is the fact that they do not believe what is generally believed, even by men of their trade.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, June 08, 2017
Joiners
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), Minority Report (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 60, § 104: