Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially insane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very many tainted with morbidity and impotence.  We do not loathe a masterpiece although we gird against its blemishes.  We are not, above all, to look for faults, but merits.  There is no book perfect, even in design; but there are many that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader.  On the one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only religious poetry on earth; yet they contain sallies that savour rankly of the man of blood.  On the other hand, Alfred de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am only quoting that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, when I accuse him of a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote was purely creative, he could give us works like Carmosine or Fantasio, in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to have been found again to touch and please us.  When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality.  But the truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine times heated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being are seized with such an ample grasp, that, even should the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to be expressed.  Out of the strong comes forth sweetness; but an ill thing poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom.  And so this can be no encouragement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, who must take their business conscientiously or be ashamed to practise it.

Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral:  it is to be sure of being untrue.  To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful.  To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth.  There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race.  I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.  There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the world’s masterpiece of morality as well as of art.  Partiality is immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the world and life.  The trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic.  In literature as in conduct, you can never hope to