But literary scholarship is in far worse plight in our Universities. No great work of classical learning has ever been achieved by an American scholar. It may be unfair to suggest comparison with men like Gilbert Murray, Croiset, or Wilamowitz; but how can we be persuaded by the professors or even by a dean that all culture will die if we forget Greek and Latin, until they satisfy us by their own work that they themselves are alive? Asia beckons to us with the hand of Fate, but Oriental scholarship is a desert through which a few nomadic professors wander aimlessly. As to the literatures in the modern European tongues, Dante scholarship has perhaps the oldest and most respectable tradition, but on examination dwindles into its proper proportions: an essay by Lowell and translations by Longfellow and Norton pointed the way; a Dante Society has nursed it; and its modern fruits, with one or two honourable exceptions, are a few unilluminating articles and text-books. Ticknor’s pioneer work in the Spanish field has had no successors, though Spanish America is at our doors; the generous subsidies of rich men have resulted as usual in buildings but not in scholarship. Of the general level of our French and German studies I prefer to say nothing; and silence is also wisest in the case of English. This field fairly teems with professors; Harvard has twice as many as Oxford and Cambridge combined, and the University of Chicago almost as many as the whole of England. Whether this plethora of professors has justified itself, either by distinguished works of scholarship or by helping young America to love literature and to write good English, I shall not decide, but leave entirely to their own conscience. This at least may be said, that the mole is not allowed to burrow in his hole without disturbance; for in this atmosphere, as a protest and counterfoil, or as a token of submission to the idols of the market-place, there has arisen a very characteristic academic product,--the professor who writes popular articles, sometimes clever, sometimes precious, sometimes genteel and refined, sometimes merely commonplace, but almost always devoid of real knowledge or stimulating thought. Even the sober pedant is a more humane creature than the professorial smart-Aleck.