Читать книгу A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies - Mrs. (Anna) Jameson - Страница 20

There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so that men’s hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live not in the heart of the writer—only in his head.

And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious—who are never weary of holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.

Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar with evil?