Note 177 — Chapter IX · ULTIMATE TERMS IN CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC

Compare Sherwood Anderson’s analysis of the same phenomenon in A Story Teller’s Story (New York, 1928), p. 198: “There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile outpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelais there was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt that the Rabelaisian flashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington, and others had point and a flare to them.

But in the factories and in army camps!”