nd defect both, of something good or at least true. It cannot be
necessary here, after scores of expressions of opinion on the subject
throughout this book, to admit or urge the importance of observation of
actual life to the novelist. The most ethereal of fairy-tales and the
wildest of extravaganzas would be flimsy rubbish if not corroborated by
and contrasted with it: it can be strengthened, increased, varied almost
at discretion in the novel proper. I hold it, as may be argued perhaps
in the Conclusion, to be the principle and the justification of Romance
itself. But, independently of the law just mentioned, that you must not
confine your observation to Ugliness and exclude Beauty--it will not do
to pull out the pin of your cart, and tilt a collection of observed
facts on the hapless pavement of the reader's mind. You are not a
reporter; not a compiler of _dossiers_; not a photographer. You are an
artist, and you must do something with your materials, add something of
yourself to them, present something not vamped from parts of actual life
itself, but reinforcing those parts with aesthetic re-creation and with
the sense of "the whole." I find this--to confine ourselves strictly to
the famous society so often mentioned in the _Journal_--eminently in
Flaubert, and as far as one can judge from translations, in
Tourguenieff; I find it, to a less extent, in Daudet; I find it
sometimes even in Zola, especially, but not merely, in his shorter
stories; I find it again, and abundantly, in Maupassant. But I never
find it in the Goncourts: and when I find it in the others it is because
they have either never bowed the knee to, or have for the nonce
discarded, the cult of the Naturalist, experimental, documentary idol,
in itself and for itself.

"But," some one may say, "you have neglected one very important point to
which you have yourself referred, and as to which you have just
recommitted yourself. Did not _les deux_ 'add something,' a very
considerable something, 'of their own'? How about their style?"

[Sidenote: And the unattractiveness of their style.]

Certainly they prided themselves on this, and certainly they took a
great deal of trouble about it. If any one likes the result, let him
like it. It appears to me only to prove that an unsound principle is not
a certain means to secure sound practice. Possibly, as Edmond boasted,
this style is not the style _de tout le monde_. And _tout le monde_ may
congratulate itself