The Doctor of Letters
400 THE COMMONWEAL September 1, 1926 attempted to market the more nutritious forms of "properly based...
...But told the names of these "bakeries," their status in the there is another kind of scholarship more to the point combine, and their appropriation for advertising the and much less common...
...You have little nature left at Glasgow chimeras of Notre Dame, few people will complain...
...It remains quite essential to whole-wheat bread, only to find that the American admire the Grammarian while conceding that very public "wouldn't buy them...
...Frank Harris in France a door only a little way and were undecided about under that deadly and vague section of the Code whether to go out or stay in...
...Such a person will be well-bred as Mr...
...Nothing could be more true, of course, than that Its activity was at its height just before the French argument about tastes is futile...
...A cohort of "prominent littera- coils instinctively from the jar of falsehood, ugliness teurs" we are promised, will rally to the defense of and insincerity...
...Harris when he faces trial, and we can be quite well as well-read...
...What is wanted is Napoleon which reads, "offense against public morals," neither the rash boldness of the headstrong, nor the makes a rather sensational news item...
...400 THE COMMONWEAL September 1, 1926 attempted to market the more nutritious forms of "properly based Oun...
...Lord George Gordon, of riotous that only he is qualified to speak of literature who memory, was even sent to the Tower for a slander has a good ear for the harmony of living...
...Barnard that the American public will buy to gain imaginative perception of life's values if the anything that is offered to them...
...There are standards that scurrilous series, L' Espion Anglais, printed in and there is a difference between the genuine and the London in the 178o's, are in a position to study many sham...
...It is the wisdom that comes "more nutritious forms...
...B Y a salutary coincidence, three booksellers in di- A man comes to it impelled by a certain fondness for verse corners of the earth-New York, Paris reading-or maybe skill at turning a readable stanza...
...and London-have declared that the literary longev- Then suddenly a world settles upon his shouldersity of the "classics" is subsidized only by the academic the world that has been lived through and interpreted atmosphere...
...The ruin of the old order in France...
...Remember Ruskin's burry advice to a Glasgow prosecution will end in preventing our young fauns correspondent: "To love the beautiful in painting, and centaurs of literature from giving a spurious value you must first love it in nature-then be long among to their releases by having them set up under the noble art...
...so untouched by realities, so much in need of direcAllowing for some exaggeration-statistics are ob- tion...
...of bootleg literature is a long and interesting one...
...but it is not timidity of the weak...
...How is a younger person than Dr...
...We erature through college and other agencies may well may delay and hamper it, but we may yet dare to take the matter to heart and ask, at least, precisely hope that through experiences we cannot imagine, what is an admirable doctor of letters...
...No one should know better of disciplined judgment...
...but the open serenity of a man the innovation it is being represented...
...A veteran teacher-Mr...
...Don't be ridiculous and affected whatever you are...
...who reon the French queen...
...within thirty miles, and no art within 300...
...Govern- on a level with a citizen who prefers a stocking to a ments, or rather courts, were reciprocally sensitive to savings bank...
...through an existence we cannot foresee, that little We are all reasonably familiar with Browning's seed may grow into a branching tree, and fill the heroic Grammarian, who "settled Hoti's business" and garden with shade and fragrance...
...THE DOCTOR OF LETTERS The more one thinks of it, the more one sees that this business of teaching literature is dizzily difficult...
...Wherefore, to be brief, we shall say his enterprises...
...God will not let any of us stay where we are, and Readers who have been developed into lovers of lit- yet the growth and progress must be our own...
...the past twenty-five seasons by diverse circumstances, A. C. Benson-once said something to the point among which are poor salaries and crowded curricula...
...But if his foot...
...He will have pocketed nuggets of sure that an abundance of eloquence, with the freedom experience and made wine from things trodden underof the press as its theme, will be spilt...
...The lot of the fugi- man who advertises his right to admire shoddy art is tive printer was by no means an easy one...
...Atlas had no heavier a burden on his shoulders...
...and another world that will have to sors," one of them remarks, "not more than two or be experienced by the young who approach, so eager, three copies of Thackeray would be sold in a year...
...viously notorious-the opinion is probably correct in How is one to manage...
...but "tastes" is not at Revolution, and those who possess or have access to all the same thing as "taste...
...The history who has looked around patiently and chosen...
...What, then, must the fate of these answer is one that seems paradoxical and improbable classics be if, as is asserted anew by three recent critics -to keep alive in oneself the spirit of youth, the joy in the same cities we have named, the standing of of living and adventuring, despite the thousand cares literary teaching has been lowered abysmally during that make for dreary age...
...We should like to be likely he was a student rather than a teacher...
...Were it not for teachers and profes- by the masters...
...master under whom he sits is vague in his interpretation, or narrow in his mood-just as if he had opened THE prosecution of Mr...
...Surely the only possible the main...
...We may prefer shantung to pongee, but only of the secret influences that were combining for the the unwary will choose a second grade of either...
Vol. 4 • September 1926 • No. 17
