ic truths, the exciting and rancid ones
must be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd
do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children
of light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom.

Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in
that strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of the
less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after
they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native
pursuits. The romantic school began with the worship of subjective
sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the
first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right
wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan
and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,--one speaking with its
masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice.
I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the
Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates. As I have
used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most
pronounced sort. Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both
think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy
of attention. Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there
for no higher purpose,--certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the
sake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outward
wrongs. One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other
for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of {173} bronze, the other
with that of an AEolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of
good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven
unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of
his Souvenirs de Jeunesse. But under the pages of both there sounds
incessantly the hoarse bass of _vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_,
which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines. No
writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the
hour of satiety with the things of life,--the hour in which we say, "I
take no pleasure in them,"--or from the hour of terror at the world's
vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come. For
terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and at
their own hour they reign in their own right. The heart of the
ro