To a different extent the same thing appears when truthfulness is concerned. There is a vitality which lies back both of naturalism and of romance and which communicates itself through books as dissimilar, say, as _Madame Bovary_ and _The Faerie Queene_—one of them the most fastidious document and one of them the most spacious dream. The gods of Homer are not real; the history of Virgil will not bear scrutiny; Dante wanders in a maze of superstitions; Shakespeare lets his plots take him almost where they like; the machinery of a folk-tale is good enough for Goethe, as it was for the author of the Book of Job. How many cosmogonies, Bernard Shaw points out, have gone to the dust heap in spite of an accuracy superior to that which keeps Genesis alive through cynical centuries! The looser Molière is in the long run no less convincing than the tighter Ibsen. Swift and Voltaire and Lucian, twitting their worlds for their follies, dare every extravagance of invention without serious penalty. Ariosto with his whimsical paladins and Scott with his stately aristocrats and Dickens with his hearty democratic caricatures and Dostoevsky with his tortured souls—to find a common denominator of truth among them is so hard that the critics who attempt it are likely to end in partisanship for this or that one and to assign the others to a station outside the approved class. Yet an author may be killed a dozen times with the charge of untruthfulness and still live. And concerning beauty the disagreement of the doctors is unending and unendable. Whitman is now called beautiful and now called ugly; so are Browning, and Hugo, and Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, and Lope de Vega, and Leopardi, and Catullus, and Aristophanes. Moreover, by any aesthetic standard which the judgment can arrive at, any one of these authors is sometimes beautiful and sometimes not. Nor does it finally matter, as it did not finally matter that Socrates had a thick body and a pug-face. The case of Socrates illustrates the whole argument. Was he good? There was so great a difference on this point among the critics of his time that the majority of them, translating their conclusion into action, put him to death as dangerous to the state. Was what he taught the truth? It is of course not easy to disentangle the actual Socrates from the more or less polemic versions of him which Xenophon and Plato furnish, but it seems clear that he had his share of unscientific notions and individual prejudices and mistaken doctrines. Was he beautiful? He confused Greek orthodoxy by being so uncomely and yet so great. But whatever his shortcomings in these regards, no one ever doubted that he was alive—alive in body and mind and character, alive in war and peace and friendship and controversy, alive in bed or at table. Life was concentrated in him; life spoke out of him.