herwoman. If we are to
have realism in its tedious descriptions of unimportant particulars, let
it be of particulars which do not excite disgust. Such is the description
of the vegetables in Zola's "Ventre de Paris," where, if one wishes to
see the apotheosis of turnips, beets, and cabbages, he can find them
glorified as supremely as if they had been symbols of so many deities;
their forms, their colors, their expression, worked upon until they seem
as if they were made to be looked at and worshipped rather than to be
boiled and eaten.

I am pleased to find a French critic of M. Flaubert expressing ideas with
which many of my own entirely coincide. "The great mistake of the
realists," he says, "is that they profess to tell the truth because they
tell everything. This puerile hunting after details, this cold and
cynical inventory of all the wretched conditions in the midst of which
poor humanity vegetates, not only do not help us to understand it better,
but, on the contrary, the effect on the spectators is a kind of dazzled
confusion mingled with fatigue and disgust. The material truthfulness to
which the school of M. Flaubert more especially pretends misses its aim
in going beyond it. Truth is lost in its own excess."

I return to my thoughts on the relations of imaginative art in all its
forms with science. The subject which in the hands of the scientific
student is handled decorously,--reverently, we might almost say,--becomes
repulsive, shameful, and debasing in the unscrupulous manipulations of
the low-bred man of letters.

I confess that I am a little jealous of certain tendencies in our own
American literature, which led one of the severest and most outspoken of
our satirical fellow-countrymen, no longer living to be called to account
for it, to say; in a moment of bitterness, that the mission of America
was to vulgarize mankind. I myself have sometimes wondered at the
pleasure some Old World critics have professed to find in the most
lawless freaks of New World literature. I have questioned whether their
delight was not like that of the Spartans in the drunken antics of their
Helots. But I suppose I belong to another age, and must not attempt to
judge the present by my old-fashioned standards.

The company listened very civilly to these remarks, whether they agreed
with them or not. I am not sure that I want all the young people to
think just as I do in matters of critical judgment. New wine does not go
well