GREAT PHILISTINISM.

Otago Witness, Issue 3832, 23 August 1927, Page 74

GREAT PHILISTINISM.

“ Thomas Campbell dares not admire without permission from some lord, doctor, or Quarterly Review,” wrote Mary Mitiord years ago. Even to-day few of us are immune from this intellectual snobbery, and especially are we ashamed to confess our dislike for books vaguely known as the “ Classics.” Few dare pay other than whole-hearted homage to Scott, and great is the delight of the Philistine reader when he discovers that so famous a man as Thackeray wrote: “ Have read the last of W. Scott’s novels. ‘ Castle Dangerous,’ and thought it mighty poor! One gets tired of long-winded descriptions of helmets and surcoats. ” It was Waller who gave the following bold criticism of ‘‘Paradise Lost”: “The old blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man: if its length be not considered a merit, it has no other.” let no average man ‘Would have the courage to confess that he was bored by the great epic.

There are many people who in spite of repeated efforts to read Wordsworth can glean little enjoyment, They are in good company, for Browning frankly admitted : “ I could not get up enthusiasm to cross the room if at the other end of it Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley were condensed into the little china bcttle yonder.” And “The White Doe of Ryls tone J’ —still considered by many to be one of Wordsworth’s finest poems—was not pleasing to Francis Jeffrey. “ The author,” he wrote. “ appears in a state of low and maudlin imbecility which would not have misbecome Master Silence in the close of a social day.” Walpole denounced “ Humphry Clinker ” a ? a “ P ar ty novel written by that profligate hireling Smollett, De Quincev objected to Dickens because he thought he made a dead set against the upper classes as such and glorified at their expense the idealised working man!

Gray’s “Elegy,” usually held to be one of the greatest poems in the English language, was “damned with faint praise” by Dr Johnson as “ a happy selection of images.” Fitz Gerald’s dislikes were many. He said that he could take no interest in Tennyson’s “ Holy Grail,” and he had little appreciation for Jane Austen, George Eliot, Morris, Rossetti, and Swinburne.

Although over a million people in Great Britain were reading “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Miss' Mitford read the first hun-

died pages and vowed she would never open the book again. Nor did she care for Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, though grown-ups and children alike were enchanted with them. As Pope pointed out : So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong. The learned man is not always the infallible critic!—John o’ London’s Weekly.