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Whatever claims the academician Victor de Laprade may have to poetic talent, he certainly sinks below mediocrity when he attempts to discuss the principles of the art he practises.  Since it has been his good-fortune to be numbered among the illustrious Forty he has several times attempted literary criticism, but never so extensively as in his last work, “Questions d’Art et de Morale."[I] This is a series of discursive essays, a few upon art in general, the greater part, however, restricted to letters; the whole written in a poetic prose not without a certain charm, but wearisome for continuous reading.

[Footnote I:  Questions d’Art et de Morale. Par Victor de Laprade, de l’Academie Francaise.  Paris:  Didier et Cie. 8vo.]

The object of M. de Laprade is to defend what he calls “Spiritualism in Art.”  He wages an unrelenting war against the modern school of Realism.  It is not the representation of visible Nature that the artist must seek; his aim must be “the representation of the invisible.”  He grows eloquent when he develops his favorite theories, and always succeeds in interesting when he applies them successively to all the arts.  As to the author’s political opinions, he takes no pains to conceal them.  His work is an outcry against equality and universal suffrage.  He traces the apathy of poetic creativeness in France to the sovereignty usurped everywhere “by the inferior elements of intelligence in the State.”  He seems to think, that, as humanity grows older, art falls from its divine ideal.  Of contemporary architecture, he says that it can produce nothing original save railroad depots and crystal palaces.  “A glass architecture is the only one that fully belongs to our age.”  Music, the “vaguest and most sensuous of all the arts,” he regards as the art of the present.  The religious worship of the future appears to him “a symphony with a thousand instruments executed under a dome of glass.”

As to the purely literary essays of M. de Laprade, they may be read both with more pleasure and more profit than those in which he attempts to discuss the principles of aesthetics.  “French Tradition in Literature,” and “Poetry, and Industrialism,” are full of suggestive thoughts, and, coming in the latter half of the volume, make us forget the pretentious nature of the first.

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M. Gustave Merlet is a more modest opponent of some of the tendencies of the age.  He presents his first book to the public under the title, “Realisme et Fantaisie,"[J] earnestly and loyally attacking the two extremes of literature.

[Footnote J:  Le Realisme et la Fantaisie dans la Litterature.  Par Gustave Merlet.  Paris:  Didier et Cie. 12mo. pp. 431.]