To this literature of art belong the sonnet of Arvers, and “The Soul,” by Sully-Prudhomme.  Musset, in his grace or pathos, is not inferior to Victor Hugo.  There are, even in his faults, certain effective boldnesses to which the author of “Notre Dame de Paris” cannot aspire.  Whence, then, comes the immense distance between these poets?  It lies in the fact that Victor Hugo, while he is a finished artist, shows himself also a thinker, philosopher, man of science and erudition.  Endowed with a profound humanitarian feeling, he is preoccupied with the evils of society, 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, which is not made up alone of baseness, egotism and duplicity.  Though it be subject to perversion, it has its luminous aspects, its radiant sides, and we should not too long turn our eyes from them.