of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab
case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with
gusto--anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new
novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured
to yourself, when reading Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ in bed: "Well,
I really must read one more chapter before I go to sleep!" Speaking
generally, the classics do not afford you a pleasure commensurate with
their renown. You peruse them with a sense of duty, a sense of doing
the right thing, a sense of "improving yourself," rather than with a
sense of gladness. You do not smack your lips; you say: "That is
good for me." You make little plans for reading, and then you invent
excuses for breaking the plans. Something new, something which is not
a classic, will surely draw you away from a classic. It is all very
well for you to pretend to agree with the verdict of the elect that
_Clarissa Harlowe_ is one of the greatest novels in the world--a new
Kipling, or even a new number of a magazine, will cause you to neglect
_Clarissa Harlowe_, just as though Kipling, etc., could not be kept
for a few days without turning sour! So that you have to ordain rules
for yourself, as: "I will not read anything else until I have read
Richardson, or Gibbon, for an hour each day." Thus proving that you
regard a classic as a pill, the swallowing of which merits jam! And
the more modern a classic is, the more it resembles the stuff of the
year and the less it resembles the classics of the centuries, the more
easy and enticing do you find that classic. Hence you are glad that
George Eliot, the Brontës, Thackeray, are considered as classics,
because you really _do_ enjoy them. Your sentiments concerning them
approach your sentiments concerning a "rattling good story" in a
magazine.

I may have exaggerated--or, on the other hand, I may have