It is not strange if we are
tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our
religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us,
till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only
please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the
harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel.
*
Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all
morality; they are the perfect duties.... If your morals
make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not
say 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but
conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives
of better and simpler people.
*
There is no quite good book without a good morality; but
the world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people
who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's Thousand and One
Nights, one shall have been offended by the animal details;
another to whom these were harmless, perhaps even pleasing,
shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascality
and cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again,
one shall have been pained by the morality of a religious
memoir, one by that of the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE. And the
point is that neither need be wrong. We shall always shock
each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun into
our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a
thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer
some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven;
enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul
details, a spirit of magnanimity.
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