In works of the imagination the omission of moral meaning is often more seeming than real, and every good reader should be able to recognize this.  However, this negligent seeming is far less hurtful than brilliant wit concealing crudities and modifying boldnesses.  Writers of this class do not lose sight of the fact that, while the French character has its audacities (contrary to the modifications of aesthetics), our language possesses a proverbial chastity, which, even in its farthest wanderings, genius comprehends and respects.  Tact and taste suffice to him who consults them to escape grossness of language.  The delicacy of the allusions leaves their images in a transparent mist; the very elasticity of the equivocation furnishes a refuge for the thought which it disquiets.

By art some most delicate subjects, very nearly approaching license, have been pardoned.  We would surely exhibit a tyrannical and morose humor to condemn to be burned en place de Greve, by the hand of the executioner, the romances of Manon Lescaut, and Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, as they have been transmitted to us by Paul Louis Courier.

But when literature, realistic or materialistic (or whatever they please to call it), freeing itself from moral accompaniment, shows itself negative or weak in its creations; if it be simpliste to the point of appealing exclusively to the senses, limiting its means of action to the development of the egotistic and instinctive side of the human passions,—­its works have no longer right of consideration in aesthetics.  The consideration of the physical being should surely figure in all representations of life, but it is not necessary that from a subordinate consideration it should ever be made all-governing.  The body, the essential part of our personality, is the companion of our higher faculties.  We should be mindful of it, making it as beautiful as possible, but giving it the reins would be even worse than giving power absolute to the imagination.

Once more, impressionalism, without the control of science and of reason, has nothing to claim in the spheres of the True, the Good, the Beautiful.

Application of the Law to Architecture.

The productions of architecture, like those of literature, have their origin in the realm of thought.  Architecture is not, like the dramatic art, in subjection to the person of the artist.  It is one of the plastic arts, and of them the most synthetic by reason of the number of agents concurring in its harmony.  Its dependence upon form is akin to that of sculpture, while the value of color in its effects is only less than in the art of the painter.