Artistically, evil or the Hideous (which is also evil) should never be used except as a foil.  There is no immorality in exhibiting the prevailing vices of the epoch, but this is the physician’s duty.  The evil lies in presenting these evils under such forms as may lead many to enjoy or tolerate them, giving them the additional power of a charming style and the specious arguments of fatality.  This is precisely the case of M. Zola.  The glamor of his disturbing theory, which annihilates free will, gives to his works a philosophical appearance.  He conceals its vacuity beneath forms of a highly-colored style, an amiable negligence and a facility that is benumbing to thought.  As he asserts nothing, no one dreams of contradicting, and one finds himself entwined in a network of repulsive depravity without a ray of healthful protection or correction.  In comparison with the blight of this disastrous system of fatality, the coarseness of the writer’s language, so loudly censured, is relatively unimportant.  The simplisme of M. Zola is not absolute, as but one of the three constituent modalities is omitted, that one being morality.  The lack is, however, no less fatal, inasmuch as the void produced by the absence of one of the noblest faculties of human activity must usually be filled by disturbing forces.

I have heard the theory, “art for art,” supported by men otherwise very enlightened.  “An artistic production need not contain a moral treatise,” they say, and this is quite true, provided the artist be a quick observer, possessing talent sufficient to handle his subject harmoniously.  Vice carries its own stigma, and pure beauty surrounds itself with light.  The author should be able readily to distinguish the one as well as the other, and his precepts should come as the harmonious result of his experience.  But such a work, at the mercy of an ill-balanced brain and unhealthful temperament, must yield bad fruit.  Talent without broad and true knowledge of reality, or that which is, instead of being invented, is incomplete in its workings and results.  Its creations resemble the light of the foot-lamp, of fireworks, of the prodigies of our modern pyrotechnists—­pleasing for a time, dazzling, captivating, intoxicating!  But lost in the life-giving beauty of a summer’s night or a glorious sunset, we are tempted to cry out with the poet,—­

    “Nothing is beautiful but the True.”

What can be said of the other simplisme which, in its search for the True, ignores the Beautiful while it disregards the Good?  Again, its partisans seek artistic truth in its very worst conditions.  Why paint in full sunshine, if the intense light obliterates details and confuses the shadows?  Does it seem a difficulty conquered?  It is far oftener a disguised insufficiency.  If my reference to painting seem premature, it is because I wished to borrow an image to show how equally grievous was the faulty touch of many of our writers of renown.  Many among them seem striving to propagate the culture of the Mediocre and Unseemly, as a thousandfold easier practice than the religion of the Beautiful.