They especially who reflect that during all the
long sweep of time the majority of those who have known him, and even of
those who have been stirred to enthusiasm by him, have known him through
the compulsion of the school, and who reflect farther on the
artificialities, the insincerities, the pettinesses, the abuses, and the
hatreds of the class-room, the joy with which at the end the text-book
is dropped or bidden an even more violent farewell, and the apparently
total oblivion that follows, will be inclined to view as exaggeration
the most moderate estimate of our debt to him.
Yet skepticism would be without warrant. The presence of any subject in
an educational scheme represents the sincere, and often the fervent,
conviction that it is worthy of the place. In the case of literary
subjects, the nearer the approach to pure letters, the less demonstrable
the connection between instruction and the winning of livelihood, the
more intense the conviction. The immortality of literature and the arts,
which surely has been demonstrated by time, the respect in which they
are held by a world so intent on mere living that of its own motion it
would never heed, is the work of the passionate few whose enthusiasms
and protestations never allow the common crowd completely to forget, and
keep forever alive in it the uneasy sense of imperfection.
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