The young man from Dorchester accused Newman of a fault which he
considered very grave, and which he did his best to avoid: what he would
have called a want of "moral reaction." Poor Mr. Babcock was extremely
fond of pictures and churches, and carried Mrs. Jameson's works about
in his trunk; he delighted in aesthetic analysis, and received peculiar
impressions from everything he saw. But nevertheless in his secret soul
he detested Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against
Newman's gross intellectual hospitality. Mr. Babcock's moral malaise, I
am afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it.
He mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the European
climate, he hated the European dinner-hour; European life seemed to him
unscrupulous and impure. And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty;
and as beauty was often inextricably associated with the above
displeasing conditions, as he wished, above all, to be just and
dispassionate, and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to
"culture," he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly
bad. But he thought it was very bad indeed, and his quarrel with Newman
was that this unregulated epicure had a sadly insufficient perception
of the bad. Babcock himself really knew as little about the bad, in any
quarter of the world, as a nursing infant, his most vivid realization of
evil had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, who was
studying architecture in Paris had a love affair with a young woman who
did not expect him to marry her.
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