It is morally impossible not to be moral. It is asking too much of human nature to ask it to be merely unrighteous when it has a chance of being self-righteous. There is an insupportable temptation to say the right thing when you are, for once, on the right side...
...A quarrel is always a mutual appeal to conscience. Under the shock of it the most fantastic paradox-mongers put their trust in the eternal truisms. The poet, when in an ecstasy, will cry out that nothing is forbidden, that everybody is justified. But the poet, when in a quarrel, will not so easily cry out that his publisher is justified. The artist may claim all colours in a rainbow subtlety, fading into each other; but the artist, when disputing an arrangement with the art-dealer, will develop an interest in black and white.
-January 8, 1916, Illustrated London News
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