esque which were suggested by this body of literary
leaders, none were acceptable by, none helpful to, the mind of a youth
trained in purity and faith.

He will find, if he reflect, that it is not in romantic, or any other
healthy aim, that the school detaches itself from those called sometimes
by recent writers "classical"; but first by Infidelity, and an absence
of the religious element so total that at last it passes into the hatred
of priesthood which has become characteristic of Republicanism; and
secondly, by the taint and leprosy of animal passion idealized as a
governing power of humanity, or at least used as the chief element of
interest in the conduct of its histories. It is with the _Sin_ of Master
Anthony that Georges Sand (who is the best of them) overshadows the
entire course of a novel meant to recommend simplicity of life--and by
the weakness of Consuelo that the same authoress thinks it natural to
set off the splendor of the most exalted musical genius.

I am not able to judge of the degree of moral purpose, or conviction,
with which any of the novelists wrote. But I am able to say with
certainty that, whatever their purpose, their method is mistaken, and
that no good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of
its diseases.

108. All healthy and helpful literature sets simple bars between right
and wrong; assumes the possibility, in men and women, of having healthy
minds in healthy bodies, and loses no time in the diagnosis of fever or
dyspepsia in either; least of all in the particular kind of fever which
signifies the ungoverned excess of any appetite or passion. The
"dullness" which many modern readers inevitably feel, and some modern
blockheads think it creditable to allege, in Scott, consists not a
little in his absolute purity from every loathsome element or excitement
of the lower passions; so that people who live habitually in Satyric or
hircine conditions of thought find him as insipid as they would a
picture of Angelico's. The accurate and trenchant separation between him
and the common railroad-station novelist is that, in his total method of
conception, only lofty character is worth describing at all; and it
becomes interesting, not by its faults, but by the difficulties and
accidents of the fortune through which it passes, while, in the railway
novel, interest is obtained with the vulgar reader for the vilest
character, because the author describes carefully to his recogni