There has always been a reasonable concern that passion constitutes a challenge to the ordeal of civility—that passion and pathology are close cousins if not twin siblings. But in a time and place where political correctness seems to be replacing moral sensibility and political biases are hawked as the morality of family values, it is reasonable to redirect attention to a world of literature in which morality has never been reduced to norms of social currency and where virtue still embodies a passion of commitment that aspires to excellence.