The impassivity of the Parnassians is, as we have seen, a callousness with regard, not to everything, but only to their fellow-creatures, united to the tenderest love for themselves. But their ‘impassibility’ has yet another aspect, and those who have found the term have probably thought above all of this, without having given themselves a complete account of it. The indifference which the Parnassians display, and of which they are particularly proud, applies less to the joys and sufferings of their fellow-creatures than to the universally recognised moral law. For them there is neither virtue nor vice, but only the beautiful and the ugly, the rare and the commonplace. They took their point of view ‘beyond good and evil,’ long before the moral madness of Frederick Nietzsche found this formula. Baudelaire justifies it in the following terms: ‘Poetry ... has no other aim than itself; it cannot have any other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, as that which will have been written only for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to say--be it well understood--that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result may not be to raise man above vulgar interests. This would evidently be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a moral aim he has diminished his poetical power, and it is not imprudent to wager that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot, under pain of death or degradation, assimilate itself to science or morals. It has not truth for its object, it has only itself.’ And Th. Gautier, who records this remark, wholly approves of it. ‘On the high summits he [the poet] is at peace: _pacem summa tenent_,’ he says,[267] in employing an image which occurs dozens of times in Nietzsche. Let us nail here first of all a current sophistical artifice employed by Baudelaire. The question to which he wishes to reply is this: Is poetry to be moral or not? Suddenly he smuggles science, with which it has nothing to do, into his demonstration, names it in the same breath with morality, shows triumphantly that science has nothing in common with poetry, and then acts as though he had demonstrated the same thing on the subject of morality. Now, it does not occur to any reasonable man of the present day to demand of poetry the teaching of scientific truths, and for generations no serious poet has thought of treating of astronomy or physics in a didactic poem. The only question which some minds would wish to consider as an open one is that of knowing if we may, or may not, exact of poetry that it be moral, and it is this question that Baudelaire answers by an unproven affirmative, and by a crafty shuffling.