twofold aspect of the morality which guides ordinary mortals, and that
which is in use by crowned heads; for, as Napoleon said, for kings and
statesmen there are the lesser and the higher morality. My scenes of
political life are founded on this profound observation. It is not a
law to history, as it is to romance, to make for a beautiful ideal.
History is, or ought to be, what it was; while romance ought to be
"the better world," as was said by Mme. Necker, one of the most
distinguished thinkers of the last century.

Still, with this noble falsity, romance would be nothing if it were
not true in detail. Walter Scott, obliged as he was to conform to the
ideas of an essentially hypocritical nation, was false to humanity in
his picture of woman, because his models were schismatics. The
Protestant woman has no ideal. She may be chaste, pure, virtuous; but
her unexpansive love will always be as calm and methodical as the
fulfilment of a duty. It might seem as though the Virgin Mary had
chilled the hearts of those sophists who have banished her from heaven
with her treasures of loving kindness. In Protestantism there is no
possible future for the woman who has sinned; while, in the Catholic
Church, the hope of forgiveness makes her sublime. Hence, for the
Protestant writer there is but one Woman, while the Catholic writer
finds a new woman in each new situation. If Walter Scott had been a
Catholic, if he had set himself the task of describing truly the
various phases of society which have successively existed in Scotland,
perhaps the painter of Effie and Alice--the two figures for which he
blamed himself in his later years--might have admitted passion with
its sins and punishments, and the virtues revealed by repentance.
Passion is the sum-total of humanity. Without passion, religion,
history, romance, art, would all be useless.