Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/138

 speaking of the dead; but to tell a gaping world that the woman "whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him," is a personality which "Town Topics" would scorn. "The Mirrors of Downing Street" aspired to a moral purpose; but taste is the guardian of morality. Its delicate and severe dictates define the terms upon which we may improve the world at the expense of our neighbour's character.

The sneaking kindness recommended by Mr. Stevenson is much harder to come by than the "raptures of moral indignation," of which he heard more than he wanted, and which are reverberating through the world to-day. The pages of history are heavy with moral indignation. We teach it in our schools, and there are historians like Macaulay who thunder it rapturously, with never a moment of misgiving. But here and