It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less marked in highly refined and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary basic qualities, and to parade and make much of verbal and technical acquirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bitter scorn of the “sensual caterwauling of the literary classes,” for this is not the only country in which books are produced that are a mere skin of elegant words blown up by copious literary gas.

In imaginative works, especially, much depends upon the quality of mere weight.  A stern, material inertia is indispensable.  It is like the immobility and the power of resistance of a piece of ordnance, upon which the force and efficacy of the projectile finally depend.  In the most daring flights of the master, there is still something which remains indifferent and uncommitted, and which acts as reserve power, making the man always superior to his work.  He must always leave the impression that if he wanted to pull harder or to fly higher he could easily do so.  In Homer there is much that is not directly available for Homer’s purposes as poet.  This is his personality,—­the real Homer,—­which lies deeper than his talents and skill, and which works through these by indirections.  This gives the authority; this is the unseen backer, which makes every promise good.

What depths can a man sound but his own, or what heights explore?  “We carry within us,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “the wonders we seek without us.”

Indeed, there is a strict moral or ethical dependence of the capacity to conceive or to project great things upon the capacity to be or to do them.  It is as true as any law of hydraulics or of statics, that the workmanship of a man can never rise above the level of his character.  He can never adequately say or do anything greater than he himself is.  There is no such thing, for instance, as deep insight into the mystery of Creation, without integrity and simplicity of character.

In the highest mental results and conditions the whole being sympathizes.  The perception of a certain range of truth, such as is indicated by Plato, Hegel, Swedenborg, and which is very far from what is called “religious” or “moral,” I should regard as the best testimonial that could be offered of a man’s probity and essential nobility of soul.  Is it possible to imagine a fickle, inconstant, or a sly, vain, mean person reading and appreciating Emerson?  Think of the real men of science, the great geologists and astronomers, one opening up time, the other space!  Shall mere intellectual acumen be accredited with these immense results?  What noble pride, self-reliance, and continuity of character underlie Newton’s deductions!