d with much
pleasure. As a fact it only wounds those requirements which have their
principle in the ideal, and which consequently do not exist for the
greater part of readers; requirements that, even in persons of most
delicate feeling, do not make themselves felt at the moments when we read
romances. With regard to the other needs of the mind, and especially to
those of the senses, this book, on the other hand, affords unusual
satisfaction. Accordingly, it must be, and will be so, that this book
will remain justly one of the favorite works of our age, and of all
epochs when men only write aesthetic works to please, and people only
read to get pleasure.

But does not poetical literature also offer, even in its classical
monuments, some analogous examples of injuries inflicted or attempted
against the ideal and its superior purity? Are there not some who, by
the gross, sensuous nature of their subject, seem to depart strangely
from the spiritualism I here demand of all works of art? If this is
permitted to the poet, the chaste nurseling of the muses, ought it not to
be conceded to the novelist, who is only the half-brother of the poet,
and who still touches by so many points? I can the less avoid this
question because there are masterpieces, both in the elegiac and in the
satirical kind, where the authors seek and preach up a nature quite
different from that I am discussing in this essay, and where they seem to
defend it, not so much against bad as against good morals. The natural
conclusion would be either that this sort of poem ought to be rejected,
or that, in tracing here the idea of elegiac poetry, we have granted far
too much to what is arbitrary.

The question I asked was, whether what was permitted by the poet might
not be tolerated in a prose narrator too? The answer is contained in the
question. What is allowed in the poet proves nothing about what must be
allowed in one who is not a poet. This tolerancy in fact reposes on the
very idea which we ought to make to ourselves of the poet, and only on
this idea; what in his case is legitimate freedom, is only a license
worthy of contempt as soon as it no longer takes its source in the ideal,
in those high and noble inspirations which make the poet.

The laws of decency are strangers to innocent nature; the experience of
corruption alone has given birth to them. But when once this experience
has been made, and natural innocence has disappeared from manners, these