say that when they were first produced the classics were books that
everybody read--and that nobody praised. Shakspere to-day is the prey of
the commentators and of the criticasters, but in his own time Shakspere
was the most popular of the Elizabethan playwrights--so popular that his
name was tagged to plays he had not written, in order that the public
might be tempted to take them into favor. Yet it was years before the
discovery was made that this popular playwright was also the greatest
poet and the profoundest psychologist of all time. Cervantes lived long
enough to be pleased by the widespread enjoyment of his careless
masterpiece; but it was a century at least before the first suspicion
arose that 'Don Quixote' was more than a "funny book." Molière was very
lucky in filling his theater when his own pieces were performed; but
contemporary opinion held that his plays owed their attraction not so
much to their literary merit as to the humorous force of his own acting.
Molière was acknowledged to be the foremost of comic actors, but only
Boileau was sure of his genius as a dramatist; and Boileau's colleagues
in the French Academy never recognized Molière's superiority over all
his immediate rivals.

The very fact that Molière and Shakspere were pleasing the plain people,
that they were able to attract the main body of the unlearned populace,
that they sought frankly to be judged by "the standard of material
prosperity"--this very fact seems to have prevented their contemporaries
from perceiving the literary merit of their plays. Indeed, it is not
unfair to suggest that the cultivated critics of the past--like some
cultivated critics of our own time--are predisposed to deny literary
merit to anything which is broadly popular. They think of literary merit
as something upon which they alone are competent to decide, as something
to be tried by the touchstones they keep in their studies, under lock
and key. The scholarly contemporaries of Shakspere saw that he did not