The Marbles of Aegina. See 1880.

The Age of Athletic Prizemen. See 1894.



PROSPER MERIMEE*

FOR one born in eighteen hundred and three much was recently become
incredible that had at least warmed the imagination even of the
sceptical eighteenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the
Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a hope,
in the sphere of practice. And the mental parallel was drawn by
Heine. In the mental world too a great outlook had lately been cut
off. After Kant's criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass
beyond the limits of individual experience seemed as dead as those of
old French royalty. And Kant did but furnish its innermost theoretic
force to a more general criticism, which had withdrawn from every
department of action, underlying principles once thought eternal. A
time of disillusion followed. The typical personality of the day was
Obermann, the very genius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of
patriotism, who has hardly strength enough to die.

[12] More energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, and
find some way of making the best of a changed world. Art: the
passions, above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely
empirical knowledge of nature and man: these still remained, at least
for pastime, in a world of which it was no longer proposed to
calculate the remoter issues:--art, passion, science, however, in a
somewhat novel attitude towards the practical interests of life. The