ing from the present to the past is
generally wrong and frequently nonsense; in politics, that abstract
systems are foolish, that a government which does not benefit its
subjects has no rights against one that will, that the masses had much
better let the upper ranks do the governing than meddle with it
themselves, that all classes are too eager to act without thinking and
ought not to attempt so much; in society, that democracy is an evil
because it leaves no specially trained upper class to furnish models
for refinement. But there is vastly more besides this, and his value
lies much more in the mental clarification afforded by his details than
in the new principles of action afforded by his generalizations. He
leaves men saner, soberer, juster, with a clearer sense of perspective,
of real issues, that more than makes up for a slight diminution of zeal.

As pure literature, the most individual trait in his writings sprang
from his scorn of mere word-mongering divorced from actual life. "A man
ought to have the right of being a Philistine if he chooses," he tells
us: "there is a sickly incompleteness in men too fine for the world and
too nice to work their way through it." A great man of letters, no one
has ever mocked his craft so persistently. A great thinker, he never
tired of humorously magnifying the active and belittling the
intellectual temperament. Of course it was only half-serious: he admits
the force and utility of colossal visionaries like Shelley, constructive
scholars like Gibbon, ascetic artists like Milton, even light dreamers
like Hartley Coleridge; indeed, intellectually he appreciates all
intellectual force, and scorns feeble thought which has the effrontery
to show itself, and those who are "cross with the agony of a new idea."
But his heart goes out to the unscholarly Cavalier with his dash and his
loyalty, to the county member who "hardly reads two books per
existence," and even to the rustic who sticks to his old ideas and whom
"it takes seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one." A petty
surface consistency must not be exacted from the miscellaneous
utterances of a humorist: all sorts of complementary half-truths are
part of his service. His own quite just conception of humor, as meaning
merely full vision and balanced judgment, is his best defense: "when a
man has attained the deep conception that there is such a thing as
nonsense," he says, "you may be sure of him for ever after." At bottom