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,
have usually been literature. But the novel has never been a
preserve for the learned, although it came perilously near to that
fate in the days of Shakespeare; has ever been written for cash or
for popular success rather than for scholarly reputation; has
never been studied for grammar, for style, for its "beauties"; has
since its genesis spawned into millions that no man can classify,
and produced a hundred thousand pages of mediocrity for one
masterpiece. All this (and in addition prejudices unexpressed and
a residuum of hereditary bias) lies behind the failure of most
professors of English to give the good modern novel its due.
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