An Essay in Cubes

Abstract

It must have occurred to many readers that our novelists are peculiarly heartless people: they have no bowels of compassion, or, at least, they have only an appendix of compassion. I do not mean that they brutally outrage their readers’ sensibilities — there might be a virtue in that, or an honesty to leaven our repugnance with respect — but the horrid self-revelation of many writers, masked as it is by the current fashion in ethic and religion, is quite unconscious, and should hold many of them to the scorn of their readers if their readers knew how to read.