possess no religious perception, seems monotonous in comparison with those small enjoyments and insignificant cares of our life,—a life, not of labour nor of production, but of consumption and destruction of that which others have produced for us. We think the feelings experienced by people of our day and our class are very important and varied; but in reality almost all the feelings of people of our class amount to but three very insignificant and simple feelings—the feeling of pride, the feeling of sexual desire, and the feeling of weariness of life. These three feelings, with their outgrowths, form almost the only subject-matter of the art of the rich classes. At first, at the very beginning of the separation of the exclusive art of the upper classes from universal art, its chief subject-matter was the feeling of pride. It was so at the time of the Renaissance and after it, when the chief subject of works of art was the laudation of the strong—popes, kings, and dukes: odes and madrigals were written in their honour, and they were extolled in cantatas and hymns; their portraits were painted, and their statues carved, in various adulatory ways. Next, the element of sexual desire began more and more to enter into art, and (with very few exceptions, and in novels and dramas almost without exception) it has now become an essential feature of every art product of the rich classes. The third feeling transmitted by the art of the rich—that of discontent with life—appeared yet later in modern art. This feeling, which, at the commencement of the present century, was expressed only by exceptional men; by Byron, by Leopardi, and afterwards by Heine, has latterly become fashionable and is expressed by most ordinary and empty people. Most justly does the French critic Doumic characterise the works of the new writers—“_c’est la lassitude de vivre, le mépris de l’époque présente, le regret d’un autre temps aperçu à travers l’illusion de l’art, le goût du paradoxe, le besoin de se singulariser, une aspiration de raffinés vers la simplicité, l’adoration enfantine du merveilleux, la séduction maladive de la rêverie, l’ébranlement des nerfs,—surtout l’appel exaspéré de la sensualité_” (_Les Jeunes_, René Doumic).[67] And, as a matter of fact, of these three feelings it is sensuality, the lowest (accessible not only to all men but even to all animals) which forms the chief subject-matter of works of art of recent times. From Boccaccio to Marcel Prévost, all the novels, poems, and verses invariably transmit the feeling of sexual love in its different forms. Adultery is not only the favourite, but almost the only theme of all the novels. A performance is not a performance unless, under some pretence, women appear with naked busts and limbs. Songs and _romances_—all are expressions of lust, idealised in various degrees.