Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/270

 From the cries that come up, you find that they hate all things that begin with P. They are carrying on a propaganda against the following: Propagandists, Prohibitionists, Prudes, Purists, Puritans, and Professors. You scrutinize your conscience. You find that in strictness you are none of these.

You were ever a "clubbable" man. You stepped without struggle into a congenial and intelligent society which you had no desire to "reform." You have regarded literature and the arts not as instruments of social salvation but rather as part of the accomplished expression of society. You have sought to give distinction to the American short story by perfecting its technique. You have been a zealous friend to the living drama and to all the arts of the theatre. You followed Lowell in your graceful defense of the independence of American writers and of the free creative American use of the English tongue.

They may charge you on technical grounds with being a professor; but in your own conscience you know that you have never been that. You were formed before pedagogy had a chance to deform you. You were forty before you ever told anecdotes in a professorial chair or brought the intoxicating airs of Bohemia and the great world of letters within the drab walls of a classroom. No Mohawk hates the pedantries of scholarship more sincerely than you do. You have successfully resisted the laws of gravitation. You are a lover of artistic form, you are a craftsman, and in whatever you