SHAM ADMIRATION IN LITERATURE. 49 



is not their object, though if they did acquire them they would prob- 

 ably 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 at- 

 tained. 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 mean- 

 ing we are apt to mistake it for a beauty.* 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 admira- 

 tion is much more often excited with respect to the Greek and Latin 

 poets. Men may not only go through the whole curriculum of a uni- 

 versity education, but take high honors in it, without the least intel- 

 lectual 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 ordi- 

 nary 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 imprac- 

 ticable to the cultivation of Shakespeare and the old dramatists, or 

 even to the more modern English poets and thinkers, he would cer- 

 tainly 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 coun- 

 try, 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 writteD, 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." 

 VOL. xvii. 4 



