he feels, is the plaything of the populace. The novel is "among
the lower productions of our literature." It is plebeian, it is
successful, it is multitudinous; the Greeks in their best period
did not practise it (but here he may be wrong); any one can read
it; let us keep it down, brethren, while we may. Many not
professors so phrase their inmost thoughts of fiction and the
novel.

And in all this the college professor is profoundly justified by
tradition, if not always by common sense. To him belongs that
custody of the classical in literature which his profession
inherited from the monasteries, and more remotely from the
rhetoricians of Rome. And there is small place for fiction, and
none at all for the novel and the short story as we know them, in
what has been preserved of classic literature. The early
Renaissance, with its Sidney for spokesman, attacked the rising
Elizabethan drama because it was unclassical. The later
Renaissance, by the pen of Addison (who would have made an
admirable college professor), sneered at pure fiction, directly
and by implication, because it was unclassical. To-day we have
lost our veneration for Latin and Greek as languages, we no longer
deprecate an English work because it happens to be in English;
nevertheless the tradition still grips us, especially if we happen
to be Brahmanic. Our college professors, and many less excusable,
still doubt the artistic validity of work in a form never
dignified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed, like
much of English literature besides, by a long line of native
productions adapting classic forms to new ages and a new speech.
The epic, the lyric, the pastoral, the comedy, the tragedy, the
elegy, the satire, the myth, even the fable, have been classic,