on or
Dante with enjoyment, is to be in a very bad way. Aristophanes,
Theocritus, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Moliere are often as light as the
driven foam; but they are not light enough for the general reader. Their
humour is too bright and lovely for the groundlings. They are, alas!
"classics," somewhat apart from our everyday ways; they are not banal
enough for us; and so for us they slumber "unknown in a long night,"
just _because_ they are immortal poets, and are not scribblers of
to-day.

When will men understand that the reading of great books is a faculty to
be acquired, not a natural gift, at least not to those who are spoiled
by our current education and habits of life? _Ceci tuera cela_,[28] the
last great poet might have said of the first circulating library. An
insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a
masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet
country. Until a man can truly enjoy a draft of clear water bubbling
from a mountain side, his taste is in an unwholesome state. And so he
who finds the Heliconian spring insipid should look to the state of his
nerves. Putting aside the iced air of the difficult mountain tops of
epic, tragedy, or psalm, there are some simple pieces which may serve as
an unerring test of a healthy or a vicious taste for imaginative work.
If the _Cid_, the _Vita Nuova_, the _Canterbury Tales_, Shakespeare's
_Sonnets_, and _Lycidas_ pall on a man; if he care not for Malory's
_Morte d'Arthur_ and the _Red Cross Knight_; if he thinks _Crusoe_ and
the _Vicar_ books for the young; if he thrill not with _The Ode to the
West Wind_, and _The Ode to a Grecian Urn_; if he have no stomach for
_Christabel_ or the lines written on _The Wye above Tintern Abbey_, he
should fall on his knees and pray for a cleanlier and quieter spirit.

The intellectual system of most of us in these days needs "to purge and
to live cleanly." Only by a course of treatment shall we bring our minds
to feel at peace with the grand pure works of the world. Something we
ought all to know of the masterpieces of antiquity, and of the other
nations of Europe. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante,
Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human
civilisation in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently
teach. The great masterpieces of the world are thus, quite apart from
the charm and solace they give us, the master instruments of a solid
educ