Both England and France have at the present time many excellent writers, men who possess every grace of style and charm of expression, who still give us only a momentary pleasure. They do not move us, they do not lay strong hands upon us, their works do not take hold of any great reality; they produce mere literature. Literary seriousness, literary earnestness, cannot atone for a want of manly seriousness and moral earnestness. A sensitive artistic conscience cannot make us content with a dull or obtuse moral conscience. The literary worker is to confront reality in just as serious a mood as does the man of science, if he hopes to produce anything that rises above mere literature. The picnickers, the excursionists, the flower-gatherers of literature do not produce lasting works. The seriousness of Hawthorne was much more than a literary seriousness; the emotion of Whittier at his best is fundamental and human. There is a passage in Amiel’s “Journal” that well expresses the distinction I am aiming at. “I have been thinking a great deal of Victor Cherbuliez,” he says, under date of December 4, 1876. “Perhaps his novels make up the most disputable part of his work,--they are so much wanting in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge, style, wit, and subtlety,--how much thought everywhere, and what mastery of language! He astonishes one; I cannot but admire him. Cherbuliez’s mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, keen, full of resources; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for the feeling which makes men earnest the irony which leaves them free. Pascal would say of him, ‘He has never risen from the order of thought to the order of charity.’ But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian is not worth an Augustine, but still he is a Lucian.... The positive element in Victor Cherbuliez’s work is beauty, not goodness, nor moral or religious life.”