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into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and,
having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a
strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it
is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.
I will be very frank--I believe it is so with all good books
except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so
wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more
apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries
out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round
that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the
contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what
is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New
truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only
wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant
conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and
the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first
at least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the
influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and
few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of
time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to
inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there
dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked
like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find
there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its
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