Pindar I have read all right), but the mere fact that I have not read Pindar, I think, ought not to prevent me and certainly would not prevent me from talking of “the masterpieces of Pindar,” or of “great poets like Pindar or AEschylus.”  The very learned men are angularly unenlightened on this as on many other subjects; and the position they take up is really quite unreasonable.  If any ordinary journalist or man of general reading alludes to Villon or to Homer, they consider it a quite triumphant sneer to say to the man, “You cannot read mediaeval French,” or “You cannot read Homeric Greek.”  But it is not a triumphant sneer—­or, indeed, a sneer at all.  A man has got as much right to employ in his speech the established and traditional facts of human history as he has to employ any other piece of common human information.  And it is as reasonable for a man who knows no French to assume that Villon was a good poet as it would be for a man who has no ear for music to assume that Beethoven was a good musician.  Because he himself has no ear for music, that is no reason why he should assume that the human race has no ear for music.  Because I am ignorant (as I am), it does not follow that I ought to assume that I am deceived.  The man who would not praise Pindar unless he had read him would be a low, distrustful fellow, the worst kind of sceptic, who doubts not only God, but man.  He would be like a man who could not call Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it.  He would be like a man who would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had been there.

But I think there is a limit, and a highly legitimate limit, to this process.  I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom.  But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps—­I think, at any rate, it would do no harm—­if he did know a little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar.  And I think the same situation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point out that Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestilently cynical, or low and beastly in his views of life.  When people brought such attacks against the morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek; and when they bring such attacks against the morality of Fielding, I regret very much that they cannot read English.

There seems to be an extraordinary idea abroad that Fielding was in some way an immoral or offensive writer.  I have been astounded by the number of the leading articles, literary articles, and other articles written about him just now in which there is a curious tone of apologising for the man.  One critic says that after all he couldn’t help it, because he lived in the eighteenth century; another says that we must allow for the change of manners and ideas; another