Although he followed upon other critics who had pursued their work with an eye to its professional academic context, Irving Babbitt was the first American critic to turn the academy itself into a polemical arena. If Babbitt viewed his work as a battle of light against darkness, then it was because he espoused a set of ideas about culture and learning which differed "on first principles" from what he took to be the prevailing philosophy of his age, a philosophy which celebrated intuition and naturalism over the reasoned discipline which had traditionally shaped the classical ethos of Western learning. While he claimed his criticism ran against the grain of society in the largest possible sense, Babbitt scrupulously avoided the tendency which Julien Benda, the French thinker he admired, had characterized as "the treason of the intellectuals"--the inclination of writers, critics, and artists to indulge their ideas in...