In view also of man’s essential faculties, but from another point of view, St.-Simonianism classed men as scholars, artists and artisans.  Then were added the priests of a new order whose nature, more perfectly balanced, was to furnish the model type of future humanity.  This classification had brought thinking people to the consideration and criticism of a system isolating and concentrating all development upon one or another of the faculties.  It was readily seen that thus sentiment would rush to folly; sensibility without a corrective would soon become weakness; unbalanced industry would lead to disregard of health and strength, while the triviality of the sensual nature, unrestrained by mental or moral activity, would soon fall into hopeless degradation.  Herein was simplisme most bitterly condemned.  Delsarte, ever studying relations between coincidences in art and the revelations of nature, arranged a typical demonstration, as ingenious as logical, of the action and play of opposing faculties.  By most wonderful pantomime he showed a man tempted to sin; then, touched by pity for the victim of his desire, at last transformed by the intervention of the moral sense, he came by slow gradations to most elevated sentiments.  One saw clearly the courage of resistance and triumph in the sacrifice.  Then, taking an inverse progression, he slid from this height to the opposite extreme of culpable resolutions.

Delsarte was the author of this mute scene which contains the elements of a drama.  The contemplation of this wonderful effect leads to the conviction of the great value to literature of the fundamental law, which may be applied to any and all literature, as a permanent criterion by which productions may be classified and judged, in their departure from the simpliste form and approach to a conception in which the constituent modalities of being act in harmonious accord.  Here, again, we have a fresh distinction between scientific and ethical literature, and that which may be termed the literature of art.  To this latter class belong romances, dramatic productions and poems—­works made up of shades of meaning and just proportions, which should be based on clear and sound philosophy, prudently disguised but indisputable and imperishable.  Here is place for the grace of an agreeable wit and the elegant flexibility of a fruitful pen.  More imperative than in any other class of writing is the demand for individual touch and that harmony of construction depending upon the proportionate relations of those elements of aesthetics,—­the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.  Thus, through aesthetics, it is elevated.