The mainspring of all progress, individual and social, is the desire to fulfill in character all one has planned in thought.  Man’s life is one long pursuit of the visions of possible excellence which disquiet, rebuke and tempt him upward.  “As to other points,” said John Milton, “what God may have determined for me I know not, but this I know—­that if he ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man, he has instilled it into mine.  Ceres, in the fable, pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness of inquiry than I, day and night, the idea of perfection.”  Haunted by his dream of excellence, the poet likened himself to one born beside the throne and reared in purple, yet by some mischance left to gypsies, midst poverty and neglect, while thoughts of the glory he has known and that imperial palace whence he came, are never out of mind.  In picturing forth these conceptions of sweetness and light, philosophers have found it hard to summarize the qualities that make up ideal manhood.

Conceding that the Christian is the perfect gentleman, who does for his fellows what an easy chair does for a tired man, what a winter’s fire is to a lost traveler, we may also affirm that Newman’s definition is inadequate and fragmentary.  As the ideal portraits of Christ, from Perugino to Hoffman, divide the kingdom of beauty—­and must be united in one new conception in order to approach the perfect face—­so the poets and the philosophers, with their diverse conceptions of ideal manhood, divide the kingdom of character.  “The true man cannot be a fragmentary man,” said Plato.  Is he not one-sided who masters the conventional refinement and the stock proprieties, yet indulges in drunkenness and gluttony?  “Pleasure must not be his sole aim,” said the accomplished Chesterfield.  “I have enjoyed all the pleasures of the world, and consequently know their futility, and do not regret their loss.  Those who have no experience are dazzled with there [Transcriber’s note:  their?] glare, but I have been behind the scenes and have seen all the coarse pulleys, which exhibit and move all the gaudy machines that excite the admiration of the ignorant audience.”

Nor is scholarship enough.  From Solomon to Burke, the wisest men have been the saddest of men.  The Scottish physician who ordered his secretary to select from his library all the books upon medicine and surgery that were printed prior to 1880 and sell them, tells us how futile is the pursuit of wisdom and how rapidly the systems of to-day become the cast-off garments of to-morrow.  Nor must the perfect man represent power and wealth alone, for “the wealth of Croesus cannot bring sleep to the sick man tossing upon his silken couch, and all the Alexanders and Napoleons have shed bitter tears, conquering or conquered.”  He who is merchant or scholar or ruler, and only that, climbs his pillar like Simeon Stylites.