It is very true that to know
mankind only through books is no knowledge of mankind at all; but ever
since man discovered how to perpetuate his utterances in writing it
has been increasingly true that literature is the principal means of
widening and deepening such knowledge.

This object of literary studies, the formation of a personality
fitted for civilised life, may be summed up in the familiar graceful
words of Ovid, who was thinking almost entirely of literature when he
wrote

ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.

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