Professor of literature? As well might there be a professor of Life, or a professor of Love, or a professor of Wisdom. Literature is too vast for anyone to profess it, excepting always him who can contribute to it. Even if our professors of literature were a more capable class of men, they would still be anomalous members of society, for they are trying to do an anomalous thing, maintain themselves in authority on a subject which is open to everybody in a world of books and libraries. And they are working under conditions not only not helpful, but distinctly unfavorable to a true knowledge and enjoyment of literature, as compared with the conditions of the person of equal intelligence outside the college. My purpose is not so much to dispraise the literary departments of universities as to praise a world which has grown so rich in opportunities that the universities are no longer the unique leaders in literature or the seats of the best knowledge about it. Our masters are on the shelves and not in the colleges. (Carlyle, Emerson, and Ruskin all said that, and it was said before them.) Without going to college we can become students of literature, professors of literature, if we have the talent and the will. I do not say or mean that we should not go to college if we can. I mean that we can stay away from college if we must and still be as wise and happy readers of books as those bachelors of arts who have sat for four years or more under “professors of literature.” If my advice were sought on this point, I should advise every boy and girl to go to college if possible, but to take few courses in English literature and English composition. One great advantage of a college course is that it offers four years of comparative leisure, of freedom from the day’s work of the breadwinner; and in those four years the student, with a good library at hand, can read for himself. I should advise the student to take courses in foreign languages, history, economics, and the sciences, things which can be taught in classrooms and laboratories and are usually taught by experts. There is no need of listening to a professor of English who discourses about Walter Scott and Shakespeare; we can read them without assistance. Literature is a universal possession among people of general intelligence. It is made, fostered, and enjoyed by men who are not professors of literature in the meaningless sense; it is written for and addressed to people who are not professors of literature; and it is understood and appreciated, I dare affirm, by no intelligent, cultivated class in the world less certainly, less directly, less profitably than by professors of literature in the modern American college.