oper; it is merely an elaborate study of a
spoilt--at least petted--and unhealthy girl in the upper stages of
society, who has at last the kindness--to herself, her relations, and
the reader--to die. If M. de Goncourt had had the slightest particle of
humour, of which there is no trace in any of his works, one might have
taken this, like other things perhaps, as a slightly cryptic parody--of
the _poitrinaire_-heroine mania of times a little earlier; but there is
no hope of this. The subject was, in the sense attached to the word by
these writers, "real"; it could be made useful for combined
physiological and psychological detail; and, most important of all, it
was more or less repulsive.[463]

[Sidenote: The impression produced by them.]

For this is what it really comes to in the Goncourts, in Zola, and in
the rest, till Guy de Maupassant, not seldom dealing with the same
material, sublimes it, and so robs it of its repulsiveness, by the force
of true comic, tragic, or romantic art. Or course it is open to any one
to say, "It may repel _you_, but it does not repel _me_." But this is
very cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words which
shocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that
"One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to a
vulture. Immediately before writing these words I was reading the
confession of an unfortunate American that he or she found _The
Roundabout Papers_ "depressing." For my part, I have never given up the
doctrine that _any_ subject _may_ be deprived of its repulsiveness by
the treatment of it. But when you find a writer, or a set of writers,
deliberately and habitually selecting subjects which are generally held
to be repellent, and deliberately and habitually refusing or failing to
pass them through the alembic in the manner suggested--then I think you
are justified, not merely in condemning their taste, but in thinking not
at all highly of their art. A cook who cannot make his meat savoury
unless it is "high" is not a good cook, and if he cannot do without
pepper and garlic[464] he is not much better.

[Sidenote: The rottenness of their theory.]

Dismissing, however, for a moment the question of mere taste, it should
be evident that the doctrine of rigid "observation," "document,"
"experience," and the like is bad in art. Like so many--some optimists
would say like all--bad things, it is, of course, a corruption, by
excess a