Shawn Wilbur on Gilbert Seldes

Gilbert Seldes' The Stammering Century gathers a rich collection of characters and episodes from 19th-century America and weaves them into a history of perfectionism, a doctrine that has fed movements ranging from anarchism to Christian revivalism to the secular cult of "positive thinking." It is a fine book, Shawn Wilbur reports, but it is undercut by Seldes' ambivalence about his subjects.