TOM JONES AND MORALITY
The two hundredth anniversary of Henry Fielding is very justly
celebrated, even if, as far as can be discovered, it is only celebrated
by the newspapers. It would be too much to expect that any such merely
chronological incident should induce the people who write about Fielding
to read him; this kind of neglect is only another name for glory. A
great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. This
is not in itself wholly unjust; it merely implies a certain respect for
the realisation and fixed conclusions of the mass of mankind. I have
never read Pindar (I mean I have never read the Greek Pindar; Peter
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.
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