There is no doubt that poverty is very painful to look upon. It disturbs our peace, our comfort, our natural forgetfulness of all that does not minister to our pleasures. People even consent to be generous--through the medium of someone else--to escape the inconvenience of sorrowful spectacles. We have our nerves, our refinement, our horror of the importunate, and we adroitly evade the demands of charity, although we can never deny the power of its appeal. “I do not want to see either illness or death,” says Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s most morbid heroine, to her husband. “Spare me the sight of everything that is ugly.” And this æsthetic person, at the moment when she kills herself in disgust after having lived for herself alone, sees that ridicule and low ideals have infected like a curse everything she touched. In the realm of art, the fear of living is mingled with the fear of feeling. It moves those dilettantes who wish neither to make a choice nor to give themselves up, who only yield themselves temporarily to all their intellectual or plastic impulses without ever surrendering to enthusiasm, and who consider themselves superior because they float on the top of things; for, deep as the subject be, love alone can penetrate beneath the surface. This fear also actuates those artists who, in the name of pure art, reject from their work all humanity and poetry; who substitute for those familiar conflicts of the soul, which are the life-food of ancient tragedy, the pretty but unsubstantial painting of pleasure, and are content to elaborate their style like the sides of a costly but empty vase--without the slightest suspicion that in art, as in everything else, there is a definite order of merit, and that they are seated on the lowest step. It is everywhere, this fear of living; it provides inspiration for the effeminate novelists and the incapable dramatists, who can create none but inconsistent characters, incapable of analysis. In the trivial adventures of their puppets they show us that everything is a matter of arrangement and nothing is worth being taken seriously, instead of inviting us to take our lives in our own hands. The great human cries, in art, are cries of strength and courage, and are often forced into utterance by unhappiness; suggesting that perhaps the happy spirit lacks the depth that is to be found in the abysses of life. Lastly, timidity, reserve, and a prudence that is sometimes legitimate but often excessive, find their expression even in our public institutions, which multiply our guardians, put us all into leading strings, and relegate to the State the duty of looking after and helping us on all occasions. They have even undertaken to replace the old-fashioned Providence--and by what? By insurance companies! We insure ourselves against accidents, against risks, against death--indeed a far-sighted wisdom! Why should we not be insured also against fear?