Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/92

Mill, and were sound Utilitarians and orthodox Political Economists. A hard-headed senior wrangler is in his own conceit a superior being to a flighty double first-class man. But perhaps his solid conviction that he was in the right path made him rather unfitted to judge of the sister University. He thought her impulsive, ill-balanced, too easily hurried into the pursuit of all kinds of theological, philosophical, and literary chimeras; and therefore was unjust to her substantial merits and even to the intellectual impulse which, with all its vagaries, was yet better than stagnation. After all, I am probably only trying to hint at the fundamental difference between the poetic and the prosaic mind. We—for I may perhaps assume that some of you belong, like me, to the prosaic faction—feel, when dealing with such a man as Arnold, at a loss. He has intuitions where we have only calculations; he can strike out vivid pictures where we try laboriously to construct diagrams; he shows at once a type where our rough statistical and analytical tables fail to reveal more than a few tangible facts; he perceives the spirit and finer essence of an idea where it seems to slip through our coarser fingers, leaving only a