What we sense in modern literature continually is not the absence of a desire to be moral but rather a pointless, overwhelming, vague, objectless moral fervor. The benevolent excitement of certain novelists and dramatists is not an isolate literary phenomenon. What is obscurer in them than in political leaders or social planners is what they are going to be benevolent about and how they are going to be benevolent or constructive. In this sphere we see a multitude of moral purposes in wild disorder. For as long as novelists deal with ideas of good and evil, justice and injustice, social despair
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