Page:Points of view (Repplier).djvu/169

Rh language every whit as contemptuous as Mr. Ruskin's, to amuse yourself, by all means, with Lever, and Gaboriau, and Jules Verne; for all higher fiction is, like the art of Florence, a sealed book to your understanding.

"Most men," says Mr. Froude, "feel the necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own expense or at another's;" and one very popular method of balancing their score is by exacting from art and literature that serious ethical purpose which they hesitate to intrude too prominently into their daily lives, rightly opining that it gives much less trouble in books. So prevalent is this tone in modern thought that even a consummate critic like Mr. Bagehot is capable of saying, in one of his supremely moral moments, that Byron's poems "taught nothing, and therefore are forgotten." Et tu, Brute! Such a sentence from such a pen makes me realize something of the bitterness with which the dying Cæsar covered up his face from his most trusted friend. That Lord Byron's poems are forgotten is rather a matter of doubt; that they are given over entirely into the hands of "a stray schoolboy" is a hazardous assertion to make; but to say that they are