speak to her for a second time aside, to | has no other aim but amusement, and beg her pardon specially.

consequently is of very little artistic value. The progress in technique from Benozzi Sozzoli to the Caracci is very considerable; nobody would admit as a consequence that the artistic value of the Farnese gallery is, in spite of its cleverest raccourcis, greater than that of a fresco in the Campo Santo, with all its defects in drawing and perspective. Now, it is difficult not to feel in these disquisitions of the specialists a consciousness of having also realized a progress. The new novel is "finer" than the old one, says Mr. Howells quite candidly, while the others plainly imply the same; and they mean not only a superiority in composition, dialogue, etc., but also a more careful study of feelings and passions, a more delicate delineation of characters, a deeper knowledge of society and its influence on the individual; for that the older writers could have no other reason for their reticence than ignorance or want of power to show their knowledge of these things, is an undoubted fact to our modern novelists, who have never learned the art of "wise omission."

the hands of a boy who was brought up in the country and has never seen a newspaper: he will not hesitate a moment between the two. The trial would already be more doubtful with a young man of classical culture; but as to a lad who had learned to read in leading articles and had left the professional school only to enter on the wholly artificial relations and modes of thinking of our society, one could scarcely expect from him that he should prefer the pure wine of Goldsmith to M. Daudet's intoxicating beverage. The great majority of the younger generation has come into the world as it were grownup, has been born into the modern civilization, whilst we older ones have at least slowly grown into it, and have consequently some inkling of the fact that under the clothes there is also something like a body. Now, the clothing of our century-i.e., our civilization, is perhaps more complicated and artificial than any that went before it, and those who live in it like to imagine that what is more complicated is also more valuable. Hence the accumulation of details which characterizes our literature and corresponds at the same time to our scientific habits. A microscopic anatomy of human nature now in its coarser manifestations, as with M. Zola or Guy de Maupassant, now in its nobler organs, as with George Eliot and Ivan Turgenief, would be vainly searched for in the older authors. The style has. become more complicated; all sciences, every technic, are forced into service, all archaisms and neologisms

It is characteristic that this ignoring of the past and forgetting of all proportion show themselves most crudely in the North Americans, for whom even Dickens and Thackeray belong already to the antique. Thus, even people of an entirely European culture like Mr. H. James speak of M. Alphonse Daudet with an admira tion so unlimited that one might be tempted to believe that the readers beyond the Atlantic are unaware of the existence of a Fielding. Fortunately, Mr. J. R. Low-gathered together in the dictionaries, unell's beautiful speech on the author of "Tom Jones" proves that there are still Americans who know where the real models of the art of narration are to be sought for. Besides, there are people enough in the Old World also, who, like Mr. John Bright, do not hesitate to place any middling novelist or historian of our time above Homer and Thucydides, whom they ought to have had more opportunity to read than their American co-religionists. It is not uncommon to hear such naïveté praised as an enviable freshness of impression and judgment; but this rests on a thorough confusion of ideas. Such impressions are not received, such judg. ments are not given, by people who stand nearer to nature than ourselves, but on the contrary by such as have no bridge behind them which might have brought them over from nature to our civilization. I can with confidence place “The Vicar of Wakefield” and “Numa Roumestan" in

usual and surprising juxtaposition of words are used to make the descriptions more effective, without however attaining the wished-for effect. It is particularly the native country of taste, the home of measure and "sobriety," which pleases itself with these exercises; and on the one hand, persons with no other talent than that of corrupting language, taste, and morals, weary themselves-cauta Minerva with manufacturing so-called tableaux de mœurs, while, on the other hand, richly gifted writers trade upon their facility in order to bring all their su perfluity on the market and to suffocate the readers under the weight of their adjectives. But "when the taste for simplicity is once destroyed" says Walter Scott, "it is long ere a nation recovers it." It is perhaps worth while to investigate more clearly than has been hitherto done, the essence of this new tendency of mind and taste.

I.

be much disposed to ascribe to him merits in science. For his works, whatever THE whole intellectual life of our cen- else they may be, are productions of the tury, and especially of the second half of imagination, and consequently utterly it, is permeated by the scientific habits useless to science, which reckons only on and the new morals which came into realities and can found no laws on such prominence shortly before the French phantasms. Besides, all scientific labor Revolution, and which since the definitive is collective and progressive; artistic defeat of romanticism towards the middle work is individual and self-inclusive. of our century, have attained almost abso- Each new work of science supersedes lute power. Now, both the scientific and its predecessor, at least in part, until it the moral view of the world are not only is entirely antiquated. The scientific insusceptible of artistic treatment - they achievement remains immortal, the scien are incompatible with it, nay, are the ne- tific work must perish. Would M. Zola gation of it. Also, the novel, as far as it resign himself to that, and does he seri is an artistic genre, has suffered from the ously imagine that "Nana" and "Potreign of these modern principles as much bouilli" are scientific achievements — ie., as, and more than, all other artistic rings in the infinite chain of science? genres, because, thanks to its form, it Certainly not. At bottom, however, these lends itself more easily to scientific treat- gentlemen of the scientific school make ment and moral jurisdiction than any their scientific pretensions in no such other. No doubt there lived before the strict sense. What they aspire to is to Revolution individual men who carried create works of art by the instrument of the scientific and moral standard into re- science, and to treat of objects, which are gions where they have no right nor cur- the results of science, while they have rency; but they were isolated instances; only the instrument of art, as well as the nowadays, this double point of view dom- standard for judging the artistic value of inates the whole of literature, and as objects; and here arises the question our culture has become exclusively book whether such an enterprise is not from the culture of culture also. No doubt man- beginning sure to be a failure. kind lives on even to-day as if those principles did not exist. It would be impossible otherwise to live; but as soon as it is bent upon judging, knowing, or repro ducing life, it no longer uses any but those two methods.

Science aims at the knowledge of the world and its casual connection. It destroys individual life in order to find its laws.e., what is common to individual phenomena. Art, on the contrary, seeks to know and interpret the world by seizing and reproducing the unity of individual life; it eliminates the general in order better to seize the particular, and in the particular it eliminates what is accidental that it may better see and show the essential. Now, as the general is only an abstraction of our intellect, and real life manifests itself only in the particular, it follows that art, in one sense, is truer than science. This, however, does not touch our question; what I want to prove is, that the so-called scientific treatment of an object can only be harmful to art, in the same way as the artistic treatment of science on its side can give rise to the monstrosities about which scientists are fond of telling edifying stories. When however M. Zola, for instance, declines the honor of having constructed works of art, the men of science will not therefore

The instrument, if I may so phrase it, which science uses to attain its aim, is understanding; that of art intuition. Science knows only a conscious knowledge of things, art only an unconscious one; and as the artist renders only what he has acquired unconsciously and directly through intuition, the artistic spectator or reader seizes what is given to him only intuitively, not consciously. Both pro ceed as we proceed in ordinary life and for practical purposes; art, therefore, is much nearer life than science. We know a person as a whole: often we do not even know whether his eyes are blue or brown, whether he has a high or a low forehead; and we are nevertheless surer of this our unconscious knowledge than the most accurate physiognomical analy sis could make us. Language has equally formed itself unconsciously, is learned unconsciously, and is for the most part used unconsciously, particularly in emotion; but it renders our feeling more faithfully than any elaborate choice of expressions would be able to do: For the scientist, it is true, language is what numbers are for the mathematician; it gives no image, but only the abstract ex pression of things. The physician-we Germans call him the "artist," Arstseizes first the total impression of his pa

tient, without rendering to himself an | tives has revealed to them, is nothing but account, often without being able to ren- the profitless expenditure of the prodigal. der to himself an account, of its compo- Art shows us Philina, in the general connents; and he relies exclusively on the fusion and despair, sitting quietly and ratthermometer and determinate symptoms, tling with her keys on the saved trunk, precisely because he has not the coup and the irresistible stands more vividly d'ail. Now our whole cultured society, before our eyes than would have been readers as well as authors, have no longer possible by a long enumeration of her the coup d'œil. The latter see only what charms, or a detailed description of the they have consciously considered, and means by which she has succeeded in getconsequently give only that; the former ting off so cheaply, and a modern writer on their side have got accustomed to be would certainly not have let pass the opcontent with that, nay, to be proud of it, portunity of both without taking advan because they thus can give themselves an tage of it; for second to description, account of everything, which is no small explanation is his principal pleasure. It satisfaction to the vanity of the under- is not to be denied that in these modern standing. But what is the consequence novels there is a more minute observation of the whole proceeding? of social and psychological facts, a closer exposition of all laws of feeling and thought, a more conscientious watching over their growth, and a more laborious analysis of the passions and their motives, than are to be found in the older novels of this, and apparently of the past, century. The whole development of a man is gone through; and if possible even that of his parents and grandparents — for this, too, passes for an application of scientific results until finally we have forgotten the man himself, as he is. True art cares little about the genesis of character; it introduces man as a finished being, and lets him explain himself by his acts and words. Shakespeare leaves it to the German savant to explain how Hamlet has become what he is; he contents himself with showing him as he is. And not drama alone shows man as he is; the novel, as long as it is a work of art, is contented to do so.

An author undertakes to paint the inner man and the outer world. He is to fulfil the former aim by an accurate psycholog ical analysis; the latter by a careful description. Now, in reality those psychological qualities have no existence whatever; they are an abstraction of our intellect, and therefore even the completest enumeration can produce no living image, even if our imagination were able to reconstruct a unity out of such plurality; whereas one characteristic feature would suffice to evoke the total impression of a personality. For it is not the parts which make man, but the cohesion; as soon as this ceases, life ceases. Now, conscious intellect never seizes the cohesion; unconscious intuition alone seizes it; and to render this with conviction is artie., reproduction of life. As much may be said of the description of the outer world; a whole page of M. Daudet, in which he describes all the articles to

be sold in the shop of a southern provisiondealer, not omitting each individual smell, and all the furniture with all the lights falling on it, is not worth the two verses in which Heine calls up to us the cavern of Uraka, as if we saw it with our bodily eyes. The former, in fact, is a faithful inventory, which we never make in life, and which consequently touches our imagination as little as the list of an upholsterer; these two verses awake in us a sensation, and so dispose our mood as to set at once our imagination to work, because there is action in them, and the action therein shown acts in turn on the reader.

Art is more economical than science; and the lavishness of authors who believe they proceed scientifically when they omit nothing of what a careful examina tion of an object or an action and its mo

asks Musset. Is it not precisely because she is not described, analyzed, and explained, but simply appears and acts? because the poet gives us in few words the impression which he has himself received, and by the rendering of his sensation our sensation is produced? We never see persons and actions in fiction; we feel the impression they exercise; this is convincing; an enumeration of qualities and circumstances, even if it were possible to make it complete, produces no disposition whatever; it produces knowl. edge.

Let nobody say that the older writers contented themselves with sketches and gave only the outlines. It is by no means

more dangerous to art than the former. All modern morals aim at making men better-i.e., other than they are. Art takes them as they are; it is content to comprehend them and to make them comprehensible. And the more mankind have abandoned the fundamental ideas of Christian charity, election by grace, and predestination, which are so repulsive to rationalism, the more decisively the tendency of morals to change men has come to the foreground in literature. It is so with society; all are to become equal in virtue, as all are to become equal in possessions. These of course are Utopian views, which have little or no influence on the course of life: no moral system changes the nature of men, as no socialism is able to change the inequality of property; but they have an influence on the way of judging things; and, as judg ment plays so large a part with modern writers, so it does also on literature.

so. What the narrator gives are the dra- | into prominence; and it proves to be still matic moments of an action, the characteristic features of a person. The truth and liveliness with which he gives the particulars that contain the whole in nuce, awake the image of that whole with its antecedents, its consequences, its secondary circumstances -i.e., the cohesion. His process is similar to that of the sculptor, who renders only the plastic elements of his object; of the painter, who renders only the picturesque elements of it, and makes an abstraction of all the rest. He takes only those traits which are fitted to produce a literary effect. Now, as I just said, it is with actions as with men. A minute and methodical enumeration of all the movements of the different regiments, accurately ascertained, which have taken part in a battle, such as we have it in the history of the war by the great General Huff, may have a scientific value; from an artistic point of view, it is without any effect, for it leaves us no intuitive image of the total action; whilst the description of the battle of Zutphen from the pen of "the poor man of Tockenburg," or that of the battle of Waterloo in Stendhal's "Chartreuse de Parme," are works of art, because they render faithfully the impres sion of such mass movements on the individual. If, on the contrary, the novelist proceeds with that scientifico-historical conscience, we get something like the struggle of the two washerwomen in the "Assommoir," which fills I don't know how many pages, and which nevertheless one has not before one's eyes, whereas the Homeric battle of Molly Seagrim remains unforgotten by whosoever reads it once only. Here, indeed, the total impression dominates the detail, whilst there the number of particulars forbids the forming of a total impression. M. Zola takes up his object like the man of science, destroying it in order to recompose it; Fielding, as the artist, who seeks and reproduces unity, not to speak of the art with which he renders the repulsive object attractive by irony, which alone gives such objects the passport to literature, drawing them out of common reality. This observation, however, would lead us to a controversy with the verists, realists, naturalists, or whatever their name, and I should like to defer this disquisition to another opportunity.

II.

EQUALLY with the scientific view, the moralizing view of the world has come

Until the middle of the past century, every class and every individual accepted the world as we accept nature, as a given order, in which there is little to be changed. People lived and acted, wrote and enjoyed naïvely, without reflection, or at least without comparing the existing world and its laws with reasoning and its norms. A man of the people thought as little of becoming a burgher, as any of us wishes to become a prince of the blood. If any one ventured to raise himself and knew how to penetrate through his circumstances, it was because he felt himself, this strength of mind and will — ie, his individuality - and not because he thought himself justified by his quality as “man." What he became, he became Et par droit de conquête et pas droit de

naissance.

His legal title was founded on his personal gifts, not on a so-called justice, which nowadays every mediocrity thinks himself entitled to invoke, and the idea of which is suggested to him by all our speeches and institutions, inasmuch as they almost directly entice him to leave his station in order to feel himself unhappy in a higher one, for which he is not fit. This eternal comparing of the actual world with the postulates of reason has "sicklied o'er" our life in more than one sense. For the whole of this so-called humane morality consists in nothing else than in exhorting us to try to put our selves in other people's steads, not by a