produced the decline of art, the dissolution of thought in scepticism,
the absolute negation of morality. Let us consider with the attention
it deserves, and in contemporary examples, this sad and curious
spectacle.

I open a treatise by M. Taine. The English historian Macaulay speaks of
literary men who "have taken pains to strip vice of its odiousness, to
render virtue ridiculous, to rank adultery among the elegant fashions
and obligatory achievements of a man of taste." The honest Englishman
takes the liberty to judge and to condemn men who have made so
pernicious a use of their talents. This pretension to make the
conscience speak is in the eyes of the French man of letters a gothic
prejudice. Listen how he expresses himself on the subject: "Criticism in
France has freer methods.--When we try to give an account of the life,
or to describe the character, of a man, we are quite willing to consider
him simply as an object of painting or of science.... We do not judge
him, we only wish to represent him to the eyes and to set him
intelligibly before the reason. We are curious inquirers and nothing
more. That Peter or Paul was a knave matters little to us, that was the
business of his contemporaries, who suffered from his vices--At this day
we are out of his reach, and hatred has disappeared with the danger--I
experience neither aversion nor disgust; I have left these feelings at
the gate of history, and I taste the very deep and very pure pleasure of
seeing a soul act according to a definite law--."[143] You understand,
Gentlemen: the distinction between good and evil, as that between error
and truth; these are old sandals which must be put off before entering
into the temple of history; and the man of the nineteenth century, if he
has taste and information, is merely an historian, and nothing more. The
sacred emotion which generous actions produce in us, the indignation
stirred in us by baseness and cruelty, are childish emotions which are