The object of M. de Laprade is to defend what he calls "Spiritualism in Art." He wages an unrelenting war against the modern school of Realism. It is not the representation of visible Nature that the artist must seek; his aim must be "the representation of the invisible." He grows eloquent when he develops his favorite theories, and always succeeds in interesting when he applies them successively to all the arts. As to the author's political opinions, he takes no pains to conceal them. His work is an outcry against equality and universal suffrage. He traces the apathy of poetic creativeness in France to the sovereignty usurped everywhere "by the inferior elements of intelligence in the State." He seems to think, that, as humanity grows older, art falls from its divine ideal. Of contemporary architecture, he says that it can produce nothing original save railroad depots and crystal palaces. "A glass architecture is the only one that fully belongs to our age." Music, the "vaguest and most sensuous of all the arts," he regards as the art of the present. The religious worship of the future appears to him "a symphony with a thousand instruments executed under a dome of glass." As to the purely literary essays of M. de Laprade, they may be read both with more pleasure and more profit than those in which he attempts to discuss the principles of aesthetics. "French Tradition in Literature," and "Poetry, and Industrialism," are full of suggestive thoughts, and, coming in the latter half of the volume, make us forget the pretentious nature of the first. * * * * * M. Gustave Merlet is a more modest opponent of some of the tendencies of the age. He presents his first book to the public under the title, "Réalisme et Fantaisie,"[J] earnestly and loyally attacking the two extremes of literature. [Footnote J: _Le Réalisme et la Fantaisie dans la Littérature_. Par Gustave Merlet. Paris: Didier et Cie. 12mo. pp. 431.] Two styles of writing, diametrically opposed in every particular, have of late years flourished in the lighter productions of France. Some there are who would seek to incarnate in letters Nature as it is, without adornings, without ideal additions. The cry of the upholders of this doctrine is: Truth in art, war against the freaks of the imagination that colors all in unreal tints. The writers who have adopted such sentiments have been termed "Realists," much to their dissatisfaction. Balzac was the greatest of them. Champfleury may be called the most strenuous supporter of the system. There is a certain force, a false air of truth, in this daguerreotype process of writing, that seduces at first sight. When a man of some genius, as Gustave Flaubert in "Madame Bovary," undertakes to paint Nature, he sets details otherwise revolting in such relief that the very novelty and boldness of the attempt put us off our guard, and we are in danger of admitting as beauties what, after all, are only audacities.