for art's sake. According to these simpletons, art for art's sake
consisted of deifying one another, in abstaining from helping chance,
who did not even know their address, and in waiting for pedestals to
come of their own accord and place themselves under them.

It is, as one sees, the ridiculousness of stoicism. Well, then we again
affirm, there exist in the heart of unknown Bohemia, similar beings
whose poverty excites a sympathetic pity which common sense obliges you
to go back on, for if you quietly remark to them that we live in the
nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is the empress of
humanity, and that boots do not drop already blacked from heaven, they
turn their backs on you and call you a tradesman.

For the rest, they are logical in their mad heroism, they utter neither
cries nor complainings, and passively undergo the obscure and rigorous
fate they make for themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by
that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want. If
they would, however, many could escape from this fatal _denouement_
which suddenly terminates their life at an age when ordinary life is
only beginning. It would suffice for that for them to make a few
concessions to the stern laws of necessity; for them to know how to
duplicate their being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet
ever dreaming on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices
are warbling, and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his
daily bread, but this duality which almost always exists among strongly
tempered natures, of whom it is one of the distinctive characteristics,
is not met with amongst the greater number of these young fellows, whom
pride, a bastard pride, has rendered invulnerable to all the advice of
reason. Thus they die young, leaving sometimes behind them a work which
the world admires later on and which it would no doubt have applauded