ABSTRACT
Those who have pretensions to a high morality are no less immoral than the others, but merely worse writers; for them as for the others, no matter what they do, in spite of themselves, good is boring and evil more or less engaging. But they would have to prove, which they have never done, that only aesthetic criteria should be applied to literature. As readers do not constitute a distinct animal species, as those who read are the same as those who perform a number of other functions, it is impossible that literature should be exempted from the categories of good and evil to which all human activities are subject. But it is not only in literature that fiction is the creator of immorality. Seeking a remedy for the immorality of letters is a completely vain undertaking. It introduced into literature a messianic self-conceit wholly contrary to the purity of art.
