But this is what we have done with this lumberland of
foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new
disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of
man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist
is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new
way of expressing them. These common and current publications have
nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and
heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that
unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.
Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by
the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and
dazzling epigram.
If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught
at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and
warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet
they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their
idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal.
Pages:
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29