standard of material prosperity is not the only test,—­indeed, it is not the final test,—­but it is the first and the most imperative, because a dramatist who fails to please the play-going public of his own time will never have another chance.  There is no known instance of a poet unsuccessful on the stage in his own country and winning recognition in the theater after his death.  Posterity never reverses the unfavorable verdict of an author’s contemporaries; it has no time to waste on this, for it is too busy reversing the favorable verdicts which seem to it to be in disaccord with the real merits of the case.

It was Mark Twain who pithily summed up a prevailing opinion when he said that “the classics are the books everybody praises—­and nobody reads.”  Let us hope that this is an overstatement and not the exact truth; but whatever the proportion of verity in Mark Twain’s saying, there is no doubt that we are running no great risk if we reverse it and 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.”  Moliere 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.  Moliere 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 Moliere’s superiority over all his immediate rivals.

The very fact that Moliere 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 conform to the classic