They probe
sores; he leads forth into the air and the sunshine. They tinge the
cheek with blushes of honorable shame; he paints it with the glow of
wholesome activity. Their point of view is that of pathology; his, that
of physiology. The great satirists, at best, give a medicine to
sickness; Goethe gives a task to health. They open a door into a
hospital; he opens a door _out_ of one, and cries, "Lo, the green earth
and blue heaven, the fields of labor, the skies of growth!"
On the other hand, by this relentless fidelity to observation, by his
stern refusal to give men supposititious qualities and characters, by
his resolute acceptance of European civilization, by his unalterable
determination to practicable results, by always limiting himself _to
that which all superior men might be expected not merely to read of with
gusto, but to do_, he is widely differenced from novelists like the
authoress of "Consuelo." He does not propose to furnish a moral luxury,
over which at the close one may smack the lips, and cry, "How sweet!" No
gardener's manual ever looked more simply to results.
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