Excerpt from The Laughing Mill and Other Stories

What is called the human interest in fiction is doubtless more absorbing than any other, but other legitimate sources of interest exist. The marvellous always possesses a fascination, and justly; for while it is neither human nature nor fact, it ministers to an aesthetic appetite of the mind which neither fact nor human nature can gratify. Superstition has been well abused; but that were a sad day which should behold the destruction in us of the quality which keeps superstition alive. Fortunately that day can never come - least of all under a Positivist administration.

Such works as "The Tempest," "Faust," and "Consuelo" show their authors at their best, because, being obliged by the subject to soar above the level of vulgar possibility, the writers catch a gleam of transcendent sunlight on their wings.

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