needed for each of these operations. Art is a form of surgery whose case is well equipped, and a pharmacopeia filled with vials of every form and odour. People talk very seriously--that is, without laughing--of initiating the people to art. In less vague terms, corresponding to a certain scientific reality, this would mean so shaping the physiology of men in general, that emotion, instead of reaching the genital centre, spreads towards the aesthetic centre. The enterprise is not of the easiest. Poor people! How it is made game of, and how stupid, in their goodness of heart, are its intellectual masters! These really believe that taste for painting, for music, for poetry, is learned like orthography or geography! And suppose it could be, and suppose a few admirations had been imparted to a few workmen. What does it matter that the people do not admire what we admire? They would have the same right to ask us to share their enthusiasms. There is no absolute aesthetic. That which moves us is beautiful; but we can be moved only in the measure of our emotional receptivity, and according to the state of our nervous system. Insensibility to what we call beauty,--a very complex idea, the moment we leave the human form,--would seem, on the whole, to be merely the sign of a healthy organism, of a normal brain, in which the nervous currents go straight to their goal, without turning aside. But this simple state is rare. All men are capable of receiving certain aesthetic emotions, and all are eager for them; but almost no man is concerned with the quality of this emotion. The important thing is to be moved. No other monument since the cathedrals--perhaps since the pyramids--has so' stirred human sensibility as the Eiffel Tower. Confronted with all that junk reared on high, stupidity itself became lyric, fools meditated, wild asses dreamed. From those heights swept down, as it were, a storm of emotions. An attempt was made to divert it, but it was too late. Success had arrived. The more admiration a work receives, the more beautiful it becomes for the multitude. It becomes beautiful and almost alive. Emotional waves, starting from it, come, like combers, to break upon a people drunk and panting. The whole organism holds carnival. Stupid and beautiful, the genius of the species smiles in the shade.