January 22D, 1875.—­The thirst for truth is not a French passion.  In everything appearance is preferred to reality, the outside to the inside, the fashion to the material, that which shines to that which profits, opinion to conscience.  That is to say, the Frenchman’s centre of gravity is always outside him,—­he is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery.  To him individuals are so many zeros:  the unit which turns them into a number must be added from outside; it may be royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, or any other temporary master of fashion.—­All this is probably the result of an exaggerated sociability, which weakens the soul’s forces of resistance, destroys its capacity for investigation and personal conviction, and kills in it the worship of the ideal.

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December 9th, 1877.—­The modern haunters of Parnassus carve urns of agate and of onyx; but inside the urns what is there?—­Ashes.  Their work lacks feeling, seriousness, sincerity, and pathos—­in a word, soul and moral life.  I cannot bring myself to sympathize with such a way of understanding poetry.  The talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter are wanting.  It is an effort of the imagination to stand alone—­substitute for everything else.  We find metaphors, rhymes, music, color, but not man, not humanity.  Poetry of this factitious kind may beguile one at twenty, but what can one make of it at fifty?  It reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of all the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty of thought and exhaustion of feeling.  I strongly share the repugnance which this poetical school arouses in simple people.  It is as though it only cared to please the world-worn, the over-subtle, the corrupted, while it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections, steady labor, honesty, and duty.  It is an affectation, and because it is an affectation the school is struck with sterility.  The reader desires in the poem something better than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks ’to find in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a conscience, who feels passion and repentance.

The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are—­for justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from himself, so that he may in no way disfigure that which he wishes to understand or reproduce.  His superiority to the common herd lies in this effort, even when its success is only partial.  He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his own impressions, by returning upon them from different sides and at different times, by comparing, moderating, shading, distinguishing, and so endeavoring to approach more and more nearly to the formula which represents the maximum of truth.

The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.

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