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.

*****

For to do anything because others do it, and not because the thing
is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to resign all moral
control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste to the devil with
the greater number. The respectable are not led so much by any desire of
applause as by a positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer
the man, the more will he require this support; and any positive quality
relieves him, by just so much, of this dependence.

*****

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the
relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or
less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our
constitutions; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so
built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness, and so
circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves
very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease more painful.
Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even
its own reward, except for the self-centred and--I had almost said--the
unamiable.

*****

Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even
to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the
kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay without.

*****

To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the
imagin