is not their object, though if they did acquire them they would probably be new ones. The majority of us, however, have much difficulty in surmounting the obstacle of an alien tongue, and when we have done so we are naturally inclined to overrate the advantages thus attained. Every 'one knows the poor creature who quotes French on all occasions with a certain stress on the accent, designed to arouse a doubt in his hearers as to whether he was not actually born in Paris. He, of course, is a low specimen of the class in question, but almost all of us derive a certain intellectual gratification from the mastery of another language, and as we gradually attain to it, whenever we find a meaning we are apt to mistake it for a beauty.[1] Nay, I am convinced that many admire this or that (even) British poet from the fact that here and there his meaning has gleamed upon them with all the charm that accompanies unexpectedness.
Since classical learning is compulsory with us, this bastard admiration is much more often excited with respect to the Greek and Latin poets. Men may not only go through the whole curriculum of a university education, but take high honors in it, without the least intellectual advantage beyond the acquisition of a few quotations. This is not, of course (good heavens!), because the classics have nothing to teach us in the way of poetical ideas, but simply because to the ordinary mind the acquisition of a poetical idea is very difficult, and when conveyed in a foreign language is impossible. If the same student had given the same time—a monstrous thought, of course, but not impracticable—to the cultivation of Shakespeare and the old dramatists, or even to the more modern English poets and thinkers, he would certainly have got more out of them, though he would have missed the delicate suggestiveness of the Greek aorist and the exquisite subtilties of the particle de. Having acquired these last, however, and not for nothing, it is not surprising that he should esteem them very highly, and, being unable to popularize them at dinner-parties and the like, he falls back upon praise of the classics generally.
Such are the circumstances which, more particularly in this country, have led to a wellnigh universal habit of literary lying—of a pretense of admiration for certain works of which in reality we know very little, and for which, if we knew more, we should perhaps care less.
There are certain books which are standard, and as it were planted in the British soil, before which the great majority of us bow the knee and doff the cap with a reverence that, in its ignorance, reminds one of fetich-worship, and, in its affectation, of the passion for high
- ↑ Since the above was written, my attention has been called to the following remark of De Quincey: "As must ever be the case with readers not sufficiently masters of a language to bring the true pretensions of a work to any test of feeling, they are for ever mistaking for some pleasure conferred by the writer, what is in fact the pleasure naturally attached to the sense of a difficulty overcome."
