such images, they have expressed their constant sense that he is the 'victim of circumstances,' the 'product of environment'; and more than one of them—for examples, Flaubert in Madame Bovary and Bourget in Le Disciple—have tellingly expressed their belief that literature is a decisive element of the environment, a potent factor in the circumstances.
The distinction between the moral and the aesthetic consciousness, so vehemently insisted upon by many contemporary critics,—with a suspicion that the 'freedom of art' depends upon maintaining it,—has, so far as I can discover, but slender support from modern psychology, and it is constantly belied by common experience. We find no independent bureaus in man for dealing separately with moral and æsthetic facts. The entire psychophysical organism receives them as a unit. Every image presented to the mind makes its record in the brain, and tends to produce an appropriate 'motor response.'
We are all by inheritance mimetic monkeys; we tend, like the untutored members of the A. E. F. in France, to imitate everything that we see and hear. There is tension of the vocal organs, even in silent reading; and our chests vibrate to the sounds of a symphony. The face of an impressionable coach involuntarily mirrors the actor speaking his lines at a rehearsal. Children, after reading the Gospels, play at crucifying their playmates.
As we grow older, we learn to check the overt
