Badassery: 19th Century Style

...such is human nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue belongs to a charity school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism. All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous, too anxious about the virtue of others, to speak out. We are ashamed of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. And if we look deeper into the matter, there are many reasons why we should not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we necessarily believe, of beings greater than man, has many parts beside its moral part. It has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious part, in which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut down to the shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings, hopes--immortal thoughts and hopes--which have influenced the life of men, and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the 'whole duty of man,' the ethical compendium, does not recognize. Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature--a good bit, of course, but a bit only--in disproportionate, unnatural, and revolting prominence...

from "Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning: or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry" by Walter Bagehot. In Collected Works of Walter Bagehot: The Literary Essays, Cambridge, 1965, Vol II, p.351 (emphasis added).