is not force
of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion
from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it
is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts in a
face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high
sensibilities."

Then, it is asked by persons of another and still more rigorous
temper, whether, as the world goes, the subject, or its treatment
either, justifies us in reading some twenty-one thousand and
seventy-five lines, which do not seem to have any direct tendency to
make us better or to improve mankind. This objection is an old enemy
with a new face, and need not detain us, though perhaps the crude
and incessant application of a narrow moral standard, thoroughly
misunderstood, is one of the intellectual dangers of our time. You may
now and again hear a man of really masculine character confess that
though he loves Shakespeare and takes habitual delight in his works,
he cannot see that he was a particularly moral writer. That is to say,
Shakespeare is never directly didactic; you can no more get a system
of morals out of his writings than you can get such a system out
of the writings of the ever-searching Plato. But, if we must be
quantitative, one great creative poet probably exerts a nobler,
deeper, more permanent ethical influence than a dozen generations of
professed moral teachers. It is a commonplace to the wise, and an
everlasting puzzle to the foolish, that direct inculcation of morals
should invariably prove so powerless an instrument, so futile a
method. The truth is that nothing can be more powerfully efficacious
from the moral point of view than the exercise of an exalted creative
art, stirring within the intelligence of the spectator active thought
and curiosity about many types of character and many changeful issues
of conduct and fortune, at once enlarging and elevating the range of
his reflections on mankind, ever kindling his sympathies into the warm
and continuous glow which purifies and strengthens nature, and fills
men with that love of humanity which is the best inspirer of virtue.
Is not this why music, too, is to be counted supreme among moral
agents, soothing disorderly passion by diving down into the hidden
deeps of character where there is no disorder, and touching the
diviner mind? Given a certain rectitude as well as vigour of
intelligence, then whatever stimulates the fancy, expands the
imaginatio