ch muscle, each fibre of the huge
prostrate body was twisted and turned in every direction. Surely it
must have been a keen satisfaction to those anatomists of the mind, to
be able, at their debut, to make experiments on a large scale; to have
a dead society to dissect, for their first "subject."

Thus we see melancholy and meditation, the demons of analysis and
controversy, appear at the same moment, and, as it were, hand-in-hand.
At one extremity of this era of transition is Longinus, at the other
St. Augustine. We must beware of casting a disdainful eye upon that
epoch wherein all that has since borne fruit was contained in germs;
upon that epoch whose least eminent writers, if we may be pardoned a
vulgar but expressive phrase, made fertilizer for the harvest that was
to follow. The Middle Ages were grafted on the Lower Empire.

Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold
foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry. Previously---
we beg pardon for setting forth a result which the reader has probably
already foreseen from what has been said above--previously, following
therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy,
the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a
single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art
which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a
certain, type of beauty. A type which was magnificent at first, but,
as always happens with everything systematic, became in later times
false, trivial and conventional. Christianity leads poetry to the
truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and
broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not
humanly _beautiful_, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the
unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the
sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if
the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the
infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct
God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the
mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life,
creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their
vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is
the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed
upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and un