14 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



will be recalled that Humpty Dumpty not only made words mean 

 whatever he wanted them to mean, he also undertook to explain "all 

 the poems that ever were invented — and a great many that hadn't 

 been invented just yet." And the average opponent of hard and close 

 work in literature is just as confident as Humpty Dumpty. 



This is no place for a panegyric on that inexhaustible mirror of 

 life held up to us in English literature. But we may record our 

 thanks that the immortals have been infinitely generous in bestowing 

 our heritage of prose and poetry. From Chaucer to Swinburne, from 

 "Sir John Mandeville" to Cardinal Newman, not to speak of the 

 living, we have a line of glorious masters by whose help our magic 

 mirror enables us to see what is noblest and best and most enduring, or 

 to drift away from our daily dulness on a sea of gladdening recreation. 

 And it is perfectly clear that we could all understand these authors 

 with absolute ease, if we cared to leaf them over. We only read the 

 little masters, the toying rhymesters, the salacious novelists — in 

 short, the popular literature of the day, because we wish to keep au 

 courant. We could just as readily appreciate Shakespeare with his 

 "boundless cloudless view," if we would, or enjoy Shelley's "flush of 

 rose on peaks divine " ; but we prefer what we prefer. Let no pedant 

 suggest that this preference has anything to do with a lack of wide and 

 serious reading, of adequate training in the Bible or of familiarity 

 with the commonplaces of classical mythology and literature. Yet 

 a gentle disputant might imagine that the appreciation of Milton's 

 "calm translunar music" would be hampered if one had to consult a 

 concordance to allay a haunting suspicion that Beelzebub was one 

 of the apostles. And I fancy the reader of almost any standard 

 author may have puzzled moments if he thinks that the Amazons 

 were a Gallic tribe conquered by Julius Caesar, that Penelope was a 

 desert island in the North Sea or that Orpheus was a New York 

 gentleman of Hebrew extraction who founded the Orpheum circuit. 



However, I may not follow my irresponsible pen into further 

 vagaries. It is apparent that any critic would be utterly unfair 

 if he should even hint that there is neither a deep-seated enthusiasm 

 for great writers on the part of most people, nor a genuine capacity 



