wickedness, fails, somehow, to enlist our full sympathy; it falls flatly
on the ear of the mind; it does not stimulate thought. It does not
satisfy; we fancy that something still remains to be said, or, if this be
all, then it was hardly worth saying. The real record of life--its terror,
its beauty, its pathos, its depth--seems to have been missed. We may admit
that the tale is in harmony with what we have been taught ought to happen;
but the lessons of our private experience have not authenticated our moral
formulas; we have seen the evil exalted and the good brought low; and we
inevitably desire that our "fiction" shall tell us, not what ought to
happen, but what, as a matter of fact, does happen. To put this a little
differently: we feel that the God of the orthodox moralist is not the God
of human nature. He is nothing but the moralist himself in a highly
sublimated state, but betraying, in spite of that sublimation, a fatal
savor of human personality. The conviction that any man--George
Washington, let us say--is a morally unexceptionable man, does not in the
least reconcile us to the idea of God being an indefinitely exalted
counterpart of Washington. Such a God would be "most tolerable, and not to
be endured"; and the more exalted he was, the less endurable would he be.
In short, man instinctively refuses to regard the literal inculcation of
the Decalogue as the final word of God to the human race, and much less to
the individuals of that race; and when he finds a story-teller proceeding
upon the contrary assumption, he is apt to put that story-teller down as
either an ass or a humbug.

As for art--if the reader happen to be competent to form an opinion on
that phase of the matter--he will generally find that the art dwindles in
direct proportion as the moralized deity expatiates; in fact, that they
are incompatible. And he will also confess (if he have the courage of his
opinions) that, as between moralized deity and true art, his choice is
heartily and unreservedly for the latter.