and prosaic scenes, and in music I hear nothing but sounds of death.

From the steppes of Russia come delirious mystics, who work up the country of Molière, Rabelais, and Voltaire. From thence surge unwholesome analyses and scandalous improprieties, that corrupt the sons of Cervantes. Finally, the glacial wind of Norway sends, in dramatic form, symbolistic fancies which delight Italy (the Italy which gave birth to Virgil, Petrarch, Raphael, and Titian!) naturalists, mystics, decadents, Ibsenists, and symbolists in imaginative writing, and the luminous, cerulean, metallic schools. of painting. Art seems to me like an acute attack of nerves, the artists sometimes like madmen, sometimes like charlatans, who hide their want of power under monstrous affectations, and cleverly profit by the general perversion of taste, whilst the public, depraved by them and the prevailing utilitarianism, is without a criterion to distinguish between the beautiful and wholesome, the ugly and absurd. Seeing my mind so radically opposed to the spirit of the age, I am seized with fear of mental aberration, there are moments in which I fancy I am one of those unhappy degenerate beings, incapable of "adapting himself to his surroundings," so well described by the modern philosophers of the Positive School, and it distresses and upsets me, until at last I think of putting myself under complete therapeutic treatment. It is possible that the douches, the kola nut, and iron wine, will make me think that the Norwegian dramas are as interesting as those of Shakespeare, Calderon, or Schiller, the Russian mystics as profound as Plato and Spinoza, the novels of the Naturalistic School as beautiful as those of Longus, Cervantes, and Goethe, and the pictures of the French decadents better than those of Rubens and Velasquez. But until this happy hour of my regeneration comes, or is possible, I crave permission to make some critical remarks on the art of writing novels, and I will lay down certain hypotheses that constitute the ground of my own inspiration, which until now has sustained and consoled me in the great amount of work I have done. Absurd or true, I love them, and I only beg my reader to give them a moment's consideration before condemning them.

II

Let us give a glance to the history of Art. There is one fact that has long demanded weighty consideration, and that is the fertility of some epochs, and the sterility of others. In the period of little more than a century between Phidias and Praxiteles, the fallen country of Greece gave birth to hundreds of sculptors, the majority unknown to us, but whose works, albeit broken and mutilated, fill us with admiration and delight, as they issue from the ruins. In a period of fifty or sixty years of the fifteenth century, there appears in the country of Flanders a powerful legion of great painters, whose pictures, if they have been equalled, have never been excelled. The inspiration of the Flemish artists suddenly passes away in the sixteenth century, and goes over to Italy, where some dozens of portentous geniuses live and work simultaneously, each one of whom would have sufficed to glorify a century. In the seventeenth century the magic power turns to the Netherlands, and produces that marvellous outburst when the painters not only numbered hundreds, but thousands. Our country, feeling elevated by Italy and Flanders to the realm of beauty, gives birth to the famous Spanish School, with Zurbaran, Ribera, Velasquez, and Murillo. Does it not seem like an epidemic? There is soon an eclipse of the splendid sun, and we are left in darkness and obscurity for two centuries, with only a medium artist approximating, but never equalling the other geniuses, occasionally shining like a melancholy, solitary star.

The explanation of this fact given by historians of Art has never satisfied me. The appearance of Art as a natural consequence of the aggrandisement of countries, as the flower of civilisation, which is the present prevailing theory, only adds one fact to another, without explaining either of the two. We can certainly assume that Art is a necessary outcome of a certain degree of prosperity attained by countries, when man, having overcome the obstacles which nature opposed to his subsistence, recovered from his fatigue and enjoyed life quietly. But the difficulty is still there. Why do many and great artists appear in certain periods

of prosperity, and none at other times of equal or more prosperity? Nobody can doubt that there actually exist in the world rich and prosperous countries, where civilisation has risen to a height unknown in history, where life is easy, safe and comfortable. France, England, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland and the United States of America, are undeniable testimonies of this statement. Besides, in no known epoch of history have artists been able to work with greater security, nor have they had such a large public solicitous to reward them as now. Compare what any painter, of however small a reputation, gets to-day with what Velasquez or Rembrandt had for their works. Compare the consideration and respect that artists enjoy nowadays, to the point of forming an aristocracy as high and proud as that of blood, with the scornful patronage accorded them by persons of distinction in other centuries, and the wretched pittance occasionally granted them by kings. What more favourable moment could present itself for the flower of poetry to open its petals to the light, and display its most brilliant colours? Fame, money, security are all in the hands of the artist who can distinguish himself, and yet our painters and sculptors cannot compare with those of other epochs! Music, the most modern of arts, has for some years been quite decadent, and literature, as I will soon show, equally so.

"There are," say naturalistic philosophers, "physiological reasons which explain and determine this phenomenon of life." I do not doubt it. Man is completely subject to the forces working in the heart of nature, which generate, as much as they hinder, the development of individuals and races. But the action of such forces is so mysterious, it works by ways so strange to us that we can only vaguely attribute to them what happens in the world. Our mind demands more approximate reasons. I will now, in all humility, suggest a rational solution of the problem, in the hope that if it do not satisfy the reader, it will at least help him to think it out, and solve it for himself.

As there is no reason why the first fifty years of a century should give birth to a hundred artists of great merit, and the following fifty give none, I venture to maintain that, given the

same conditions of race, environment, culture, security and stimulus, men are born the same, or equal, in the second half of a century when there has been no material change in the environment, so there should be as many artists as in the first half. The sole difference is, that whereas in the first half, men born with capacities to feel beauty, and to represent it, were able to bring them to light by a natural and logical development, those in the second half, for causes I will now point out, have not been able to reveal their mental treasures.

I attribute the decadence of the beaux arts, where there is no external reason to explain it, to the perversion of taste, and consequent want of a healthy and adequate purpose in artists. I believe it is the taste which determines the height to which the painter, sculptor, or poet can rise in his works. The artists of the epochs of decadence were born as well endowed by nature as those of the most flourishing periods. Let us glance at our own epoch. Let us examine the pictures painted at the present day, the statues sculptured, or let us read attentively the works of imagination published, and nobody can justly deny that they show intellect, invention and study. If not in the majority, for the production is excessive, I see in many of them the hand and intelligence of a superior man perfectly endowed by nature to produce beautiful and lasting works. Why are they not produced? Simply through misdirected intelligence, and a wrong turn given to the artist's inspiration from the environment in which he is born-in short, from a want of taste. This absence of taste, above all in the cultivation of the arts, is the prevailing feature of the day. "To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man pick'd out of ten thousand," says Hamlet. And parodying these words, we can say that in the fine arts nowadays a man of good taste is one, not only among ten thousand, but among a hundred thousand. The cause of this perversion of taste is not due to passing circumstances, nor to defects of training, transmitted from some individuals to others, nor to fortuitous aberrations. The cause is deeper in my opinion; it arises from the same cause that induced the vast artistic superiority of Western over Asiatic art,

in the great development of individual energy. It is equally true that there is no principle so true and effective but what, when exaggerated, becomes an error and a source of ruin, and that the no extreme" of the Greek oracle is the greatest truth uttered in the world up till now. Superior individual energy, assertion of independence in face of nature, producing such variety of characters, is what has elevated the Greek over the Indian, Western Art over the Asiatic. In the Eastern world are only types, hence the monotony, often not void of beauty and sublimity in its poetic monuments. But that principle, fruitful for civilisation, and particularly for the arts, which engendered the Iliad, the Prometheus Bound, the Niobe and the Parthenon, and which later gave rise to the portentous works of the Renaissance, when exaggerated in Modern Europe, and drawn out of its just limits, has resulted in want of equilibrium, and consequent decadence. Exaggerated individual energy and independence have become conceit. This is the canker-worm which corrodes and paralyses contemporary artists. Note the method of the ancients, and those who imitated them in the time of the Renaissance. An artist who by his excellent works attains to the merited position of Master, collects around him a more or less numerous company of youths, to whom he reveals the secrets of his art, and whom he imbues with his own spirit, and, under a slow apprenticeship, raises them from assistants to collaborators in his works. The pupil, finally becoming a master, ends by leaving, but he continues working in the same line and with the same methods, and without being conscious of it, and without thinking of "breaking any mould," by the mere force of his own artistic personality, he produces distinctive works as beautiful, or more beautiful than those of his master, but without breaking the bond uniting them. The same thing happens in literature: Homer is the great master of the Hellenic world. All dramatic, epic or lyric poets come to him as the source of inspiration. Eschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, and Euripides modestly confessed that they lived on the crumbs from his table. Later, when Rome becomes the centre of literature, her most notable poets were not above calling themselves disciples