Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/63

 worse than ever about Milton. On that same evening, while some folks were talking about Mr. Morris's "Earthly Paradise," I heard a scornful voice exclaim, "Oh! give me 'Paradise Lost,'" and with that gentleman I did have it out. I promptly subjected him to cross examination, and drove him to that extremity that he was compelled to admit he had never read a word of Milton for forty years, and even then only in extracts from "Enfield's Speaker."

With Shakespeare—though there is a good deal of lying about him—the case is different, and especially with elderly people; for "in their day," as they pathetically term it, Shakespeare was played everywhere, and every one went to the play. They do not read him, but they recollect him; they are well acquainted with his beauties—that is, with the better known of them—and can quote him with manifest appreciation. They are, intellectually, in a position much superior to that of a fashionable lady of my acquaintance who informed me that her daughters were going to the theatre that night to see Shakespeare's "Turning of the Screw."

The writer who has done most, without I suppose intending it, to promote hypocrisy in literature is Macaulay. His "every schoolboy knows" has frightened thousands into pretending to know authors with whom they have not even a bowing acquaintance. It is amazing that a man who had read so much should have written so contemptuously of those who have read but little; one would have thought that the consciousness of superiority would have forbidden such insolence, or that his reading would have been extensive enough to teach him at least how little he had read of what there was to read; since he read some things—works of imagination and humor, for example—to such very little purpose, he might really have bragged a little less. One feels quite grateful to Macaulay, however, for avowing his belief that he was the only man who had read through the "Faerie Queen"; since that exonerates everybody—I do not say from reading it, because the supposition is preposterous—but from the necessity of pretending to have read it. The pleasure derived from that poem to most minds is, I am convinced, analogous to that already spoken of as being imparted by a foreign author: namely, the satisfaction at finding it—in places—intelligible. For the few who possess the poetic faculty it has great beauties, but I observe, from the extracts that appear in poetic selections and the like, that the most tedious and even the most monstrous passages are often the most admired. The case of Spenser in this respect which does not stand alone in ancient English literature—has a curious parallel in art, where people are positively found to go into ecstasies over a distorted limb or a ludicrous inversion of perspective, simply because it is the work of an old master, who knew no better, or followed the fashion of his time.

Leigh Hunt read the "Faerie Queen," by the by, as almost everything else that has been written in the English tongue, and even