Read it through once

In those days the only men who cared to analyse the ideas that were drifting through society, or to give them any permanent form by writing, were men who, in the modern sense of the words, were artists — men who, by the singular effect of temperament upon the perception of things, were constrained to take distinct and individual shape of expression in language. For my own part, I sometimes wonder whether this fact may not account for many otherwise incomprehensible peculiarities in the intellectual life of our time. The men who did the shaping were of small number; they were not academical intellects;—we cannot, without injustice to them, call them philosophers;—they were artists. They were such as edited their views by a taste or an æsthetic sense; and so, perhaps, they failed in the higher sense of philosophy; but they gave us, none the less, certain types, certain forms of life, certain accessible ideals, which are those that most of us, in the long run, live by.