of the pleasantest sensations of all. 'This stuff is fit for a
detective story,' is often said, as who should say, 'This stuff is fit
for an epic.'

Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification,
there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of
it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for
them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually
tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of
the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and
when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the
blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder
seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of
a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their
own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime
seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or
effect, a mass of 'jarring atoms,' a prolonged mental torture of
irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous
vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his
wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this
is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth
except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this
article. We have no doubt in the world that, if the other forms of art
had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If
people had spoken of 'sonnets' with the same accent with which they
speak of 'music-hall songs,' a sonnet would have been a thing so
fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a
rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics
were only fit for children and nursemaids, 'Paradise Lost' might have
been an average pantomime: it might have been called 'Harlequin Satan,
or How Adam 'Ad 'em.' For who would trouble to bring to perfection a
work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write
'Othello' if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, 'Mr. Shakespeare
is fit for something better than writing tragedies'?

The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is
especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art,
glorified by Aristophanes and Moliere, have sunk into such contempt may
be due to many caus