Late Essays

Abstract

(Like the next essay, this is from Impressions of Theophrastus Such, George Eliot’s last published work. The moral argument becomes more valid in an age of mass-media when, by a kind of Gresham’s Law, the lowest tastes are appealed to, and thereby developed, for commercial exploitation, most damagingly in television, where the appeal is to eye and ear. George Eliot’s image of the new Famine or cultural impoverishment which threatens recalls W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’; barbarism is never far off, the nineteenth-century writer Sainte-Beuve observes (p. 162); it may be obvious in crises, but the preservation of civilization demands vigilance at all times.)