All this is barbarism because it is ignorance or denial of the
laws of growth. It belongs anthropologically with totemism,
sacerdotalism, neo-ritualism, and every other remnant of the
terrible shackles of use and wont which chained early man to his
past. It is Egyptian. Its high priests are sometimes learned but
their minds are frozen. Beware of them.
In England, so far as I am able to judge, this variety of
barbarism shows itself usually in a rather snobbish intolerance of
anything not good form in literature. The universities still
protect it, but its home is in London, among the professional
middle class.
In America its symptom is well-disguised fear. Some of us are
afraid of our literary future just as many of us are afraid of
democracy. Poetry and criticism (we feel) which used to be written
by classicists and gentlemen are now in the hands of the corn-fed
multitude, educated God knows how or where. Fiction, once a
profession, has become a trade, and so has the drama. The line
between journalism and literature is lost. Grub Street has become
an emporium. Any one, anything can get into a story or a
sonnet.
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