graph. But they
have indeed not the slightest trace of impropriety about them. They are
not tainted in the slightest with the insidious viciousness of French
novels. Their fault arises from rather an opposite tendency of mind and
a different train of feelings. They are of the world, worldly. They are
cold and sarcastic; they inculcate self-sufficiency, and preach to man
to be a tower of strength in himself, not always in the praiseworthy
Christian way. There is no single word of scoffing or disrespect for
religion, no slur upon it whatsoever. Only we are aware, as by an
instinct, that in the circle of our characters it is wholly ignored. In
their world it is not an agent, whether for themselves or others. It is
as unrecognized a system as is Mohammedanism or Buddhism with ourselves.
The heroes have all 'seen the world' in the most thorough and terrible
sense of those words. For them virtue and vice are much alike. Their
wills are iron. They fix their eye upon their goal, and straight thereto
they firmly march over the obstacles of precipices, through the
blackness of quagmires, crashing athwart laws, customs, and
conventionalities, as elephants calmly striding through underbrush. They
disregard the prejudices of the world equally for evil and for good. And
a moral independence which might furnish forth the most glorious of
martyrs in invincible panoply is quite as likely to assist a hardy
sinner. The sneer and sarcasm and contempt are for the conventionalities
of the world, for the belief of the mass of mankind in right and wrong,
and for the customs and habits which the republic of humanity has
established for better assistance in the paths of virtue--as if,
forsooth, such were vulgar because common, and to be despised by the
mighty because useful to the feeble. This is not the proper spirit for
the satirist. If he wields his pen in support of such a theory he will
do more harm than good. A conventionality is not necessarily bad or
contemptible merely as such. Not a promiscuous and indiscriminate
slashing, but a careful pruning is the proper method in the garden of
society. The indiscreet hand will cut what it should leave, and leave
perhaps what might have been better sacrificed. The artificial trellises
whereon we train our feeble virtues, which may hardly stand by their own
strength, must not be shattered in a general slaughter of weeds which
have taken root and nourishment in the rank soil of fashionable
etiquette.