And it is only the lack, in so many of the greatest writers, and the neglect, in so many educators and educational systems, of that due balance of qualities and acquirements of which I spoke just now, which have induced in superficial minds a distrust and often a contempt of literature as a subject of education.  The good citizen or man of the world—­in the best sense of the phrase—­must not be the slave of literary proclivities to the ruin of his functions as father or husband or friend or man of action and affairs.  The world of letters, if lived in too exclusively, is an unreal world, though without it the actual world is almost meaningless.  Now the genus irritabile vatum, even when their thoughts, as Carlyle put it, “enrich the blood of the world,” have very generally appeared to the plain man of goodwill as very defective in the art of living.  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.  But a more potent cause and a real justification of this attitude is the neglect of due balance of qualities and acquirements by so many educators and educational systems.  Great educators have themselves rarely been narrow-minded men; but the traditions they have founded have gone the way of all traditions.