Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Regeneration Versus Degeneration
The true optimist, working for the regeneration of humanity, acknowledges that the present state of society is imperfect; but he denies that it is rotten at the core and is constantly drifting from bad to worse, as the Opposite school asserts. It can surely never be otherwise than healthful and of use to search for the finest passages in literature, the grandest and sweetest strains in music, the most symmetrical figures in sculpture, and the most harmonious blending of form and color in the painter's art. The critical spirit of the times is responsible for many of the very tendencies which are brought so prominently to the front in the painful scenes depicted in the literature of to-day. Is it healthful to be forever contemplating empty skulls, while so many active minds await examination Need we perpetually interrogate closet skeletons and force open private cupboards to prove the unwelcome ghosts of the dead, while the fields of the living are filled with summer blossoms and the air redolent with their sweetness?
The vice of criticism is the bane of modern civilization and the sensational interviewers and reviewers of the period seem to close their ears against harmonies, so intent are they on listen ing to discords; and to shut their eyes to purity and honor, so eager are they to retail the latest scandal to the highest bidder. Newspapers certainly do good, but they might do more good and inflict less pain 'on their readers were they to devote para graphs to vice and crime and double-leaded columns to virtue.
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