48 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SHAM ADMIRATION IN LITERATURE. 



By JAMES PAYN. 



IN all highly civilized communities Pretense is prominent, and sooner 

 or later invades the regions of Literature. In the beginning, this 

 is not altogether to be reprobated ; it is the rude homage which Igno- 

 rance, conscious of its disgrace, offers to Learning ; but after a while, 

 Pretense becomes systematized, gathers strength from numbers and 

 impunity, and rears its head in such a manner as to suggest it has 

 some body and substance belonging to it. In England, literary pre- 

 tense is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education. 

 When young gentlemen from ten to sixteen are set to study poetry (a 

 subject for which not one' in a hundred has the least taste or capability 

 even when he reads it in his own language) in Greek and Latin authors, 

 it is only a natural consequence that their views upon it should be 

 slightly artificial. The youth who objected to the alphabet that it 

 seemed hardly worth while to have gone through so much to have 

 acquired so little, was exceptionally sagacious ; the more ordinary lad 

 conceives that what has cost him so much time and trouble, and en- 

 tailed so many pains and penalties, must needs have something in it, 

 though it has never met his eye. Hence arises our public opinion 

 upon the ancient classics, which I am afraid is somewhat different 

 from (what painters term) the private view. If you take the ordi- 

 nary admirer of iEschylus, for example not the scholar, but the 

 man who has had what he believes to be " a liberal education " and 

 appeal to his opinion upon some passage in a British dramatist, say 

 Shakespeare, it is ten to one that he shows not only ignorance of the 

 author (the odds are twenty to one about thai), but utter inability to 

 grasp the point in question ; it is too deep for him, and especially too 

 subtile. If you are cruel enough to press him, he will unconsciously 

 betray the fact that he has never felt a line of poetry in his life. He 

 honestly believes that the " Seven against Thebes " is one of the great- 

 est works that ever was written, just as a child believes the same of 

 the " Seven Champions of Christendom." A great wit once observed, 

 when bored by the praises of a man who spoke six languages, that he 

 had known a man to speak a dozen, and yet not say a word worth 

 hearing in any one of them. The humor of the remark, as sometimes 

 happens, has caused its wisdom to be underrated ; for the fact is that, 

 in very many cases, all the intelligence of which a mind is capable is 

 expended upon the mere acquisition of a foreign language. As to 

 getting anything out of it in the way of ideas, and especially of poeti- 

 cal ones, that is almost never attained. There are, indeed, many who 

 have a special facility for languages, but in their case (with a few ex- 

 ceptions) one may say without uncharity that the acquisition of ideas 



