In abstract theory, people ought to-day to view the infamy of Heliogabalus with at least the disfavor we reserve for our neighbors’ children: in practise, a knave’s wickedness becomes with time an element of romance, and large iniquities serve as colorful relief to the tedium of history. And it seems banal to point out that it no longer matters ethically, to anyone breathing, that a shoe-maker’s son, rather more than three centuries ago, made ruin of his body through intemperance, for the case is no longer within the jurisdiction of morals.
The fictional author John Charteris in James Branch Cabell’s Beyond Life: Dizaine des Démiurges (1919), Chapter IV, “Which Admires the Economist,” §5.
Categories
James Branch Cabell
