that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader. On the one hand,
the Hebrew Psalms are the only religious poetry on earth; yet they
contain sallies that savour rankly of the man of blood. On the other
hand, Alfred de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am only
quoting that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, when I accuse him
of a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote was purely
creative, he could give us works like "Carmosine" or "Fantasio," in
which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to have been found
again to touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote "Madame Bovary," I
believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the
book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality. But
the truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul
of nine-fold power nine times heated and electrified by effort, the
conditions of our being are seized with such an ample grasp, that, even
should the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot
fail to be expressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweetness; but an
ill thing poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom. And so this can be
no encouragement to knock-knee'd, feeble-wristed scribes, who must take
their business conscientiously or be ashamed to practise it.

Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himself and
his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far
more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of
being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a
sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are
sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no
point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the
true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the
truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it
impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to
be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to
glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes
into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the
world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is
immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the
world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the
work of on