y of an apology that this is a little
volume of impressions and confessions, and that personally I should find
life rather duller if I had not the Duc de Saint-Simon at hand. Besides,
I do not think that there is a single young person of my acquaintance
who would allow me to read any of his pages to him or her!

Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or any other novel that happens
to be the vogue. As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de
S['e]vign['e] when she says, writing of her granddaughter, that bad
books ought to be preferred to no books at all. But it would be almost
better for the young not to begin to read until they are old, if one is
to gauge the value of books by the unfledged taste of youth. Purity,
after all, is not ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance at a
certain age is very desirable.

While I write this, I have in mind a little essay of great charm and
value by Coventry Patmore on "Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper
into the fundamentals of morality than any other modern work on the
subject. And, by the way, having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main
Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and several other novels, I turn
from their lack of gaiety to find a reason why art should not be gloomy,
and here it is, from Coventry Patmore's "Cheerfulness in Life and Art."

"Rejoice always: and again I say, Rejoice," says one of the highest
authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in
psychological science writes, "A cheerful heart is what the Muses
love."

Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his
own interior gaiety--of which a word by and by--is so interior, and
its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to
have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a
representation of life; and that the good are gay is a commonplace,
and one which, strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it
is, when rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave
heart is always gay in this sense: that, although it may be
afflicted and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of others,
it refuses in the darkest moment to consent to despondency; and
thus a habit of mind is formed which can discern in most of its own
afflictions some cause for grave rejoicing, and can thence infer at
least a probability of such cause in cases where i