The belief in the reality of the Ideal in
personal and social life is not only the joy and inspiration of the
poet and thinker; it is also the salvation of the race. It is
imperishable, because it is the product of the play of the imagination
on the realities of life; and until the imagination perishes, the
vision of the ultimate perfection will form and reform in the heart of
every generation. It is the inspiration of every art, the end of every
noble occupation, the secret hope of every fine character.
Idealism in this sense, not as the product of an easy and ignorant
optimism turning away from the facts of life, but as the product of a
large and spiritual dealing with those facts, is the very soul, not
only of noble living, but of those noble expressions of life which the
greater writers have given us. They disclose wide diversity of gifts,
but they have this in common,--that, in discovering to us the
spiritual order of the facts of life, they disclose also those ideal
figures which the race accepts as embodiments of its secrets, hopes,
and aims. It is a significant fact that, in portraying the Greek of
his time, Homer has given us also the ideal Greek and the Greek
ideals.
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