Style for
style has produced in these days hasty literature and thoughtless
improvisation; love for love leads to unnatural vice, onanism,
and prostitution; art for art ends in Chinese knick-knacks,
caricature, the worship of the ugly. When man no longer looks to
labor for anything but the pleasure of exercise, he soon ceases
to labor, he plays. History is full of facts which attest
this degradation. The games of Greece, Isthmian, Olympic,
Pythian, Nemean, exercises of a society which produced everything
by its slaves; the life of the Spartans and the ancient Cretans,
their models; the gymnasiums, playgrounds, horse-races, and
disorders of the market-place among the Athenians; the
occupations which Plato assigns to the warriors in his Republic,
and which but represent the tastes of his century; finally, in
our feudal society, the tilts and tourneys,--all these
inventions, as well as many others which I pass in silence, from
the game of chess, invented, it is said, at the siege of Troy by
Palamedes, to the cards illustrated for Charles VI.
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