enthusiast who neglects its better for its worser part, the issue
is direct. All are the victims of hereditary opinion; but some
should know better than to be thus beguiled.

The Brahman among American readers of fiction is of course the
college professor of English. His attitude (I speak of the type;
there are individual variations of note) toward the novel is
curious and interesting. It is exhibited perhaps in the title by
which such courses in the novel as the college permits are usually
listed. "Prose fiction" seems to be the favorite description, a
label designed to recall the existence of an undeniably
respectable fiction in verse that may justify a study of the baser
prose. By such means is so dubious a term as novel or short story
kept out of the college catalogue!

Yet even more curious is the academic attitude toward the novel
itself. Whether the normal professor reads many or few is not the
question, nor even how much he enjoys or dislikes them. It is what
he permits himself to say that is significant. Behind every assent
to excellence one feels a reservation: yes, it is good enough for
a novel! Behind every criticism of untruth, of bad workmanship, of
mediocrity (alas! so often deserved in America!) is a sneering
implication: but, after all, it is only a novel. Not thus does he
treat the stodgy play in stodgier verse, the merits of which,
after all, may amount to this, that in appearance it is literary;
not thus the critical essay or investigation that too often is
like the parasite whose sustaining life comes from the greater
life on which it feeds. In the eyes of such a critic the author of
an indifferent essay upon Poe has more distinguished himself than
if he had written a better than indifferent short story. Fiction,