DIY History | Transcribe | Scholarship at Iowa | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897 | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 21

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The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 21

literature bad as art and literature if it lacks the righteous purpose? Not at all, neither has English literature monopoly of righteousness and purpose. It means that this literature has insisted more strongly than others upon the necessary connection between art and ethics; that it has never prized a profitless soulless beauty; and that so long as the world can be made better by literature, bookmakers can and ought to help. Between two books of equal literary merit, but of unequal purpose, it gives greater and more lasting favour to the more useful book. It believes that taste holds intimate relations with the intellect and the moral sense. Whether it is right or wrong, in this general idea, it is certain that any change in it, whether wrought by believers in "Art for Art's sake," by pseudo Greek poets, by cosmic bards who sometimes confuse right and wrong, or by strictly realistic novelists,
18.

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literature bad as art and literature if it lacks the righteous purpose? Not at all, neither has English literature monopoly of righteousness and purpose. It means that this literature has insisted more strongly than others upon the necessary connection between art and ethics; that it has never prized a profitless soulless beauty; and that so long as the world can be made better by literature, bookmakers can and ought to help. Between two books of equal literary merit, but of unequal purpose, it gives greater and more lasting favour to the more useful book. It believes that taste holds intimate relations with the intellect and the moral sense. Whether it is right or wrong, in this general idea, it is certain that any change in it, whether wrought by believers in "Art for Art's sake," by pseudo Greek poets, by cosmic bards who sometimes confuse right and wrong, or by strictly realistic novelists, 18.