ognized as one of the earliest and most
brilliant examples of that modern style of novel which, beginning where
Balzac left off, attempted to do for literature what the photograph has
done for art. For those who take the trouble to drink out of the cup
below the rim of honey, there is a scene where realism is carried to its
extreme,--surpassed in horror by no writer, unless it be the one whose
name must be looked for at the bottom of the alphabet, as if its natural
place were as low down in the dregs of realism as it could find itself.
This is the death-bed scene, where Madame Bovary expires in convulsions.
The author must have visited the hospitals for the purpose of watching
the terrible agonies he was to depict, tramping from one bed to another
until he reached the one where the cries and contortions were the most
frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No hospital physician would
have pictured the straggle in such colors. In the same way, that other
realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient suffering from delirium tremens,
the disease known to common speech as "the horrors." In describing this
case he does all that language can do to make it more horrible than the
reality. He gives us, not realism, but super-realism, if such a term
does not contradict itself.

In this matter of the literal reproduction of sights and scenes which our
natural instinct and our better informed taste and judgment teach us to
avoid, art has been far in advance of literature. It is three hundred
years since Joseph Ribera, more commonly known as Spagnoletto, was born
in the province Valencia, in Spain. We had the misfortune of seeing a
painting of his in a collection belonging to one of the French princes,
and exhibited at the Art Museum. It was that of a man performing upon
himself the operation known to the Japanese as hararkiri. Many persons
who looked upon this revolting picture will never get rid of its
remembrance, and will regret the day when their eyes fell upon it. I
should share the offence of the painter if I ventured to describe it.
Ribera was fond of depicting just such odious and frightful subjects.
"Saint Lawrence writhing on his gridiron, Saint Sebastian full of arrows,
were equally a source of delight to him. Even in subjects which had no
such elements of horror he finds the materials for the delectation of his
ferocious pencil; he makes up for the defect by rendering with a brutal
realism deformity and ugliness."

The fi