et cette ambition, où des puissances d'observation et de vision jusqu'alors atrophiées ont trouvé enfin leur emploi, a enfanté (pour peu que le génie s'en soit mêlé) des œuvres débordantes de vie, d'une somptuosite de couleurs prestigieuse et d'une plasticité souveraine."
This is the art that produced the masterpieces of romantic genius, that inspired the Hugos, the Shelleys, the Mussets, the Keats, and even the Baudelaires, Swinburnes, and Claudels. Think of what literature would be if such as these had never written—and this is the crux of the matter, with all the emphasis of their expansive personalities to inspire them! It is futile to condemn an art on the basis of standards that are not artistic. We can affirm that no art is good that neglects human nature, and in so far as human nature is governed by ethical standards art must also reflect them. But just as we cannot judge science by ideals that are artistic, so we cannot judge art by ideals that are moral. Le mal romantique may be bad socially; whether it is bad artistically depends on the extent to which it destroys the formal control of the artist over his material. Goethe, as Mr. Babbitt twice remarks, was wont to judge Werther as "weakness seeking to give itself the prestige of strength"—but Goethe, just as other romantic geniuses of calibre, had the strength to objectify his experience and thus keep the poison of life from contaminating his art. How far Mr. Babbitt is from grasping the relation of art to truth, which is the only aspect of art that can be considered "ethical," is seen in these singular words on Flaubert:
"Beauty in the purely aesthetic and unethical sense that Flaubert gives to the word is little more than the pursuit of illusion. The man who thus treats beauty as a thing apart, who does not refer back his quest of the exquisite to some ethical centre, will spend his life, Ixion-like, embracing phantoms."
Madame Bovary may be a positive evil for those naive persons to whom all reading is a sensual, subjective experience. For such even the Sunday-school library has its dangers. But it is sufficient that Madame Bovary was true to human nature in all of its details to make it enter that field of a "higher reality" which Mr. Babbitt correctly attributes to Aristotle in its formulation; and therefore Madame Bovary belies the words we have just quoted. In this sense
