The master maintained the possibility of reaching this end by two opposing ways, not contradictory; i.e., the production of the Beautiful under its physical, mental and moral forms; and by the manifestation of the Ugly under the same forms, exhibiting what he called the hideousness of vice.  Immorality may be rendered poetical and artistic, because of its being a corruption of the moral, often preserving the imprint of its origin, even throughout its greatest errors.  Its agitation, its combats and its defeats interest the judgment and the heart.  The Ugly or unseemly, morally speaking, is the synonym of vice.

The Ugly in the language of the arts has many diverse significations.  It is in these shades and variable proportions that it affects our subject, but the depicting of repulsive things, foreign to morality, to sentiment and to passion, has no right to exist in aesthetics.  It may be possible to cure a vice by showing its hideousness.  But does this warrant such exciting of the disgust of the senses?  It is an outrage to the worship of the Beautiful, without compensation of any kind.

There can be no advantage to humanity in exhibiting the hideousness of disease or the monstrosities of certain natural phenomena!  Open to them the museums of comparative anatomy, but close the galleries consecrated to the fine arts!  There exist also monstrosities which are not included in these categories; they present no moral danger, but are disagreeable and repulsive to good taste.  They consist of fantastic forms, in accordance with the spirit of an inferior civilization, reminding one of the misshapen and gigantic prehistoric animals, whose bones astound us, and which disappeared from our globe that man might appear.

Among cultivated contemporaries these eccentricities spring from an inclination toward originality, caprice, grotesque taste; from a similar impulse to that which directs literature toward burlesque and parodies, and the plastic arts toward caricature.  Such productions may please some distinguished and intelligent natures which cannot have been highly favored in the distribution of the delicacies of sentiment and the exquisite graces of wit.  In a word, the art indulging in this class of manifestations acts according to the mode simpliste.  I borrow this term from Charles Fourier, and I say once for all, that by it I mean not the entire, but the almost exclusive predominance of one or the other of the modalities of the human being.  Here the simplisme being altogether intellectual, while it is inferior to manifestations in which the being expands harmoniously, it wounds no essential in the synthesis of the me; while a predomination of the sensual to the same degree is most pernicious to that which delights in it and antipathetic to those who do not live solely in the material aspects of existence.