e horrified squealing of prudes is not yet
silent over pages of Wilhelm Meister: that high and chaste
book, the Elective Affinities, still pumps up oaths from
clergymen. Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over Faust.
Out with Goethe!

"Here is Cervantes: open Don Quixote, paragon of romances,
highest result of Spain, best and sufficient reason for her
life among the nations, a laughing novel which is a weeping
poem. But talk such as this of Sancho Panza and Tummas Cecial
under the cork trees, and these coarse stories and bawdy
words, and this free and gross comedy--is it to be endured?
Out with Cervantes!

"And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose pages you may
read, done from the Latin by Spedding into a magnificent
golden thunder of English, the absolute defense of the free
spirit of the great authors, coupled with stern rebuke to the
spirit that would pick and choose, as dastard and effeminate.
Out with Lord Bacon!

"Not him only, not these only, not only the writers are under
the ban. Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory,
giant dreamer of the Infinite in marble; but he will not use
the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints the Holland
landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and
glooms of Eternity; and his pictures have been called
'indecent,' Here is Mozart, his music rich with the sumptuous
color of all sunsets; and it has been called 'sensual.' Here
is Michael Angelo, who makes art tremble with a new and
strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and sublime forms
that tower above the centuries, and accost the Greek; and his
works have been called 'bestial.' Out with them all!"

In his summing up, stirred to wrath by the low tone of contemporary
comment, O'Connor proceeded to expound the philosophy of literary
ideals:

"The level of the great books is the Infinite, the Absolute.
To contain all, by containing the premise, the truth, the idea
and feeling of all, to tally the universe by profusion,
variety, reality, mystery, enclosure, power, terror, beauty,
service; to be great to the utmost conceivability of
greatness--what higher level than this can literature spring
to? Up on the highest summit stand such works, never to be
surpassed, never to be supplanted. Their indecency is not that
of the vulgar; their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their
e