To advance upon them harmoniously

A Speech at Eton in Irish Essays by Matthew Arnold

A series on notable passages:

Nobody can say that the bathing at Eton is dirty and nasty. But at Eton, as at Nicopolis, the moral disposition in which the pupil arrives at school, the thoughts and habits which he brings with him from home and from the social order in which he moves, must necessarily affect his power of profiting by what his schoolmasters have to teach him. This necessity is common to all schooling.

[snip]

As Goethe says of life: Strike into it anywhere, lay bold of it anywhere, it is always powerful and interesting,--so one may almost say of classical literature. Strike into it where you like, lay hold of it where you like, you can nearly always find a thread which will lead you, if you follow it, to large and instructive results.

[snip]

The word I will take is the word eutrapelos, eutrapelia. Let us consider it first as it occurs in the famous Funeral Oration put by Thucydides into the mouth of Pericles. The word stands there for one of the chief of those qualities which have made Athens, says Pericles, "the school of Greece;" for a quality by which Athens is eminently representative of what is called Hellenism: the quality of flexibility. "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians; and it is no doubt a charming gift. Lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners,--all these seem to go along with a certain happy flexibility of nature, and to depend upon it.

[snip]

Here, I say, is the true moral: that man has to make progress along diverse lines, in obedience to a diversity of aspirations and powers, the sum of which is truly his nature; and that he fails and falls short until he learns to advance upon them all, and to advance upon them harmoniously.