richer, happier and better balanced. One should
read the portrait which he has limned with a bold brush of the last man,
sole survivor and heir of a hundred successive civilisations, left to
himself yet self-sufficient in the midst of his immense stores of
science and art. He is happy as a god because he is omniscient and
omnipotent, because he has just discovered the true answer of the Great
Enigma, yet dying because he cannot survive humanity. By means of an
explosive substance of extraordinary potency he blows up the globe with
himself in order to sow the immensity of space with the last remnants of
mankind. This system very naturally has a good many adherents. The
graceful Hypatias, however, who form his female followers, idly lying
round the master's stone, are agreed it would be proper to associate
with the last man, the last woman, not less ideal than he.

But what shall I say of art and poetry? Here to be just, praise must
become panegyric. Let us limit ourselves to indicating the general
tendency of the transformations that have taken place. I have related
what has become of our architecture which has been turned "outside in",
so to say, and brought into keeping with its surroundings, the idealised
image in stone, the essence and consummation of former Nature. I shall
not return to the subject. But I must still say a word about this
immortal and overflowing population of statues, this wealth of frescoes,
enamels, and bronzes which in concert with our poetry celebrate in this
architectural transfiguration of the nether world the apotheosis of
love. There would be an interesting study to make on the gradual
metamorphoses that the genius of our painters and sculptors has imposed
for the last three centuries on these traditional types of lions,
horses, tigers, birds, trees and flowers, with which it is never weary
of disporting itself, without being either helped or hindered by the
sight of any animal or any plant. Never, in fact, have our artists, who
protest strongly against being taken for photographers, depicted so many
plants, animals and landscapes, than since these were no more.
Similarly, they have never painted or sculptured so many draperies,
since everyone goes about almost naked, while formerly at the time when
humanity wore clothes the nude abounded in art. Does it mean that
nature, now dead and formerly alive, from which our great masters drew
their subjects and themes, has become a simple hieroglyphi