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.  His insight went to the soul of the persons he described, and he struck into that spiritual order in which the ideal is not only a reality, but, in a sense, the only reality.

Cervantes, in the very act of destroying a false Idealism, conventionally conceived and treated, made one of the most beautiful revelations of a true Idealism which the world has yet received.  Shakespeare’s presentation of the facts of life is, on the whole, the most comprehensive and impressive which has yet been made; in the disclosure of tragic elements it is unsurpassed; and yet what a host of ideal figures move through the plays and invest them with a light beyond the glow of art!  In the Forest of Arden and on Prospero’s Island there live, beyond the touch of time and the vicissitudes of fate, those gracious and beautiful spirits in whom the race sees its noblest hopes come true, its instinctive faith in itself justified.  These spirits are not airy nothings, woven of the unsubstantial gossamer of which dreams are made; they are born of a deep insight into the possibilities of the soul, and a rational faith in their reality.  Prospero is as real as Trinculo, and Rosalind as true as Cressida.  These ideal persons are not necessarily fortunate in their surroundings or happy in their lot; they are simply perfect in their development of a type.  They are not abnormal beings, rising above normal conditions; they are normal beings, rising above abnormal conditions.  They stand for wholeness amid fragments, for perfection amid imperfection; but the very imperfection and fragmentariness by which they are surrounded predicts their coming and affirms their reality.

In the rounded and developed nature there must be a deep vein of the Idealism which grows out of the vision of things in their large relations—­out of a view of men ample enough to discern not only what they are at this stage of development, but what they may become when development has been completed.  Nothing is more essential than the courage, the joy, and the insight which grow out of such an Idealism, and no spiritual possession is more easily lost.  The spiritual depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the immersion in the stream of events, the decline of moral energy, conspire to blight this noble use of the imagination, and to chill the faith which makes creative living and working possible.  The familiar companionship of the great Idealists is one of the greatest resources against the paralysis of this faith and the decay of this faculty.