If their aspirations have been
above the standards of their day, their practice has often been below
them in such essentially social qualities as probity, faithfulness,
consideration for others. Moreover their outlook upon life, intense
and inspiring though it be, is often a very partial one. Even so, it
does not follow that because a poet or a philosopher is not in every
respect "the compleat gentleman," a citizen _totus teres atque
rotundus_, his works are not profitable for the building up of that
character. If it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the
discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous
chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for
what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that
ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with
Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. Tolstoy is indeed a case in point.
He is one of the giants of literature, whose masterpieces are already
classics; and this position is unaffected by the various judgments
that may be formed either of his critical or of his practical wisdom.
The lack then of a due balance of qualities and acquirements in so
many authors, and we may add other artists, is a cause, but no
justification, of that belittlement and even distrust of the literary
side of education which are on the whole marked features of the
English attitude to-day.
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