of poetry was well-made verses; the essential virtue was suggestion, the power of evoking images or particular states of the soul, by sequence of syllables, so skillfully conjoined to these images and states as to produce, as nearly as possible, the perceptible figure. Thus, strange and sonorous words had to be found to accomplish this; rhyme became of paramount importance. This tendency finally developed into pure symbolism.
There was no relief from this monotony, from the refinements of this artificial literature, which either ran into specialism in erudite researches, into the most subtle analyses of physical love, into gross and indecent libertinism, or into obscure thought, purely technical and aesthetic or artistic scribbling. There was an absolute lack of sympathy, inspiration, and refinement, of the ethical; literary productions, to be successful, it seems, had to be written in a spirit of arrogant superiority, of a loathing for life and humanity, of indifference. All that tends to the finer feelings, to the sympathetic and humane, to delicacy and compassion, to the child and the mother, to the friend and councillor, was not in evidence.
Literature, with few exceptions, had become a mere vocation or trade. Although there were Coppée's delightful and wholesome poems and Alphonse Daudet’s sympathetic and adventurous tales of Mon Moulin, Le Petit Chose, Contes du lundi, Tartarin de Tarascon, these were rare exceptions. To be new, strange, to find a delicate combination of words to shock, to arouse the
