ciety, with its rights, its mistakes, its tendencies and with their
amelioration; while the poet of "Jacques Rolla"--a refined
sensualist--devotes his verse to the unbridling of the torments of
imagination in delirium, to the agitations of hearts which have place
only for love.

If comparison be made between novelists and dramatists of diverse
schools, why has not M. Zola, who in so many regards should be
considered a master, attained the heights of eminence upon which are
enrolled the names of Shakespeare, Moliere, Corneille, Schiller, Madame
de Stael, and George Sand? It is because M. Zola, profound analyst and
charming narrator, even more forcibly than Musset breaks the aesthetic
synthesis by the _absence of morality_ in his writings. His fatalism
arrests the flight of that which would be great; he corrupts in the germ
wonderful creative powers! M. Zola's great lack lies in his considering
in man his physical nature only. Between mind and matter he holds a
magnifying lantern full upon the lowest molecules, and rejects
disdainfully the initiating atom that Leibnitz has signalized as the
centre of life. M. Zola has created a detestable school which already
slides into the mire beneath the weight of the crimes which it excites
and the disgust which it arouses. Should we blame Zola and his disciples
for the danger and the impotence of this method? Should we not impute
the wrong in greater measure to philosophical naturalism?

In considering _materialism_ and _naturalism_ let us not lose sight of
the fact that while materialism is _simpliste_, naturalism (in so much
as it represents nature) is essentially comprehensive and necessarily
synthetic; harmony of force and matter being an invariable requisite of
_life_.

_Realism_, another term strangely compromised, seems to proclaim itself
under the banner of materialism, while the _Real_, implying the idea of
the _True_, cannot be contained in _simplisme_. It is a most pernicious
evil that writers, calling themselves realistic, still concentrate their
talent upon the painting of vicious types and characters drawn in an
infernal cycle of repulsive morals.

"Man is the object of art." Never could the words of the master more
appropriately interpose than before the encroachments of literary
_simplisme_. The man of whom Delsarte speaks is not confined to such or
such a category of the species. He proposes that aesthetics should
interpret an all-comprehensive human nature, whi