up accidents and irrelevancies before it until its very face is hidden.  And we should be the more watchful not to confuse the pedagogic mind with the scholarly since it is from the scholar that the pedagogue pretends to derive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine commentators—­be it a Skeat or a Masson or (may I add for old reverence’ sake?) an Aldis Wright—­fetching home bits of erudition, non sua poma, and announcing ‘This must be the true Sion, for we found it in a wood.’

Hence a swarm of little school books pullulates annually, all upside down and wrong from beginning to end; and hence a worse evil afflicts us, that the English schoolboy starts with a false perspective of any given masterpiece, his pedagogue urging, obtruding lesser things upon his vision until what is really important, the poem or the play itself, is seen in distorted glimpses, if not quite blocked out of view.

This same temptation—­to remove a work of art from the category for which the author designed it into another where it can be more conveniently studied—­reaches even above the schoolmaster to assail some very eminent critics.  I cite an example from a book of which I shall hereafter have to speak with gratitude as I shall always name it with respect—­“The History of English Poetry,” by Dr Courthope, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford.  In his fourth volume, and in his estimate of Fletcher as a dramatist, I find this passage:—­

But the crucial test of a play’s quality is only applied when it is read.  So long as the illusion of the stage gives credit to the action, and the words and gestures of the actor impose themselves on the imagination of the spectator, the latter will pass over a thousand imperfections, which reveal themselves to the reader, who, as he has to satisfy himself with the drama of silent images, will nor be content if this or that in any way fall short of his conception of truth and nature,

—­which seems equivalent to saying that the crucial test of the frieze of the Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in Bloomsbury.  So long as the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to Pheidias’ design, and the sunlight of Attica imposed its delicate intended shadows edging the reliefs, the countrymen of Pericles might be tricked; but the visitor to the British Museum, as he has to satisfy himself with what happens indoors in the atmosphere of the West Central Postal Division of London, will not be content if Pheidias in any way fall short of his conception of truth and nature.  Yet Fletcher (I take it) constructed his plays as plays; the illusion of the stage, the persuasiveness of the actor’s voice, were conditions for which he wrought, and on which he had a right to rely; and, in short, any critic behaves uncritically who, distrusting his imagination to recreate the play as a play, elects to consider it in the category of something else.

In sum, if the great authors never oppress us with airs of condescension, but, like the great lords they are, put the meanest of us at our ease in their presence, I see no reason why we should pay to any commentator a servility not demanded by his master.