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,
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.
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