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