They must, in short, be Greeks, not barbarians. It is the reverse of barbarous to defend the old, but the man who can see no need, no good, no hope in change is a barbarian. He flinches from the truth physical and the truth spiritual that life is motion. I particularly refer to the literary person who sneers at novels because they are not epics, and condemns new poems or plays unread if they deal with a phase of human evolution that does not please him. I mean the critic who drags his victim back to Aristotle or Matthew Arnold and slays him on a text whose application Aristotle or Arnold would have been the first to deny. I mean the teacher who by ironic thrust and visible contempt destroys the faith of youth in the literary present without imparting more than a pallid interest in the past. I mean the essayist who in 1911 described Masefield as an unsound and dangerous radical in verse, and in 1921 accepts him as the standard "modern" poet by whom his degenerate successors are to be measured. 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.... The Greek of to-day (as we venture to define him) views all this with some regret, and more concern. He sees that fine traditions are withering, that fine things are being marred by ignorant handling. He fears debasement, he hates vulgarity, and his realist soul admits the high probability of both in a society whose standards are broader than they are high. But he also sees new energies let loose and new resources discovered; he recognizes new forms of expression, uncouth or colloquial perhaps, but capable of vitality and truth, and not without beauty. He bends his mind toward them, knowing that if he ignores them their authors will ignore him and his kind. The Egyptian is afraid. He pulls his mantle closer about him and walks by on the other side.