It is as absurd to say that a man is a drunkard because he describes an orgy, or a debauchee because he narrates a debauch, as to claim that a man is virtuous because he has written a book on morals; we see the contrary every day. It is the character that speaks, not the author; his hero may be an atheist, that does not mean that he is an atheist; he represents brigands as acting and talking like brigands, but that does not make him a brigand. On that theory we should have to guillotine Shakespeare, Corneille, and all the writers of tragedy; they have committed more murders than Mandrin and Cartouche; we have not done it, however, and, indeed, I do not believe that we shall do it for a long time to come, however virtuous and moral criticism may become. It is one of the manias of these little shallow-brained scribblers always to substitute the author for the work, and to resort to personalities, in order to give some paltry scandalous interest to their miserable rhapsodies, which they are well aware that nobody would read if they contained only their individual opinions. We can hardly imagine the tendency of all this wailing, or what good purpose all this indignation and snarling can serve--or who impels these Messieurs Geoffroy on a small scale to set themselves up as the Don Quixotes of morality, and, like genuine literary policemen, to lay hands upon and club, in the name of virtue, every idea that appears in a book with its mob-cap awry or its petticoats raised a little too high.--It is very strange. Whatever they may say, the present age is immoral,--if the word means anything, which we much doubt,--and we require no other proof of it than the quantity of immoral books it produces and the success they meet with.--Books follow morals, morals do not follow books.--The Regency produced Crébillon, not Crébillon the Regency. Boucher's little shepherdesses were painted and immodest because the little marchionesses of the day were painted and immodest.--Pictures are painted after models, not models after pictures. Somebody or other has said somewhere or other that literature and the arts have a great influence on morals. Whoever he is, he is unquestionably a great fool.--It is as if some one should say: "Green peas make the springtime grow;" on the other hand, green peas grow because it is spring, and cherries because it is summer. The trees bear fruit, the fruit assuredly does not bear the trees--the law is everlasting and invariable in its variations; the centuries succeed one another and each bears its fruit, which differs from that of the preceding century; books are the fruit of morals. Beside the moral journalists, under this shower of homilies, as if it were a summer shower in a park, there has arisen, between the boards of the Saint-Simonian stage, a school of little mushrooms of a curious new variety, of which we propose to give the natural history.