bing belowstairs for a "subject," and washing your own
household dirty linen in public--for profit.

[463] It may be well to smash, in a passing note, a silly catchword
popular with some rather belated English admirers of the Naturalist
school a few years ago. They praised its "frankness." You might as well
praise the "straightforwardness" of a man who goes out of his way to
explore laystalls and, having picked up ordure, holds it up to public
view.

[464] Both excellent things in their way, of course. Perhaps it would be
better to say asafoetida.

[465] It is perhaps only fair to warn readers who may not know the fact,
that some very good and (in the French as well as the English sense)
respectable judges think much better of the work, and even of the men or
man, than I do. _Renee Mauperin_ especially (as indeed I have admitted)
has a considerable body of suffrage; the general style pleases some, and
it has been urged for Edmond that good men liked him. But these good men
had not read his diary. There is, however, no doubt that it is an
exceptionally strong case of "rubbing the [right or the] wrong way."
Books and men and style all rub me the wrong way; and, though I have
some knack at using the brushes and _fixatures_ of pure criticism, I
can't get myself smoothed down.

[466] See note at close of chapter. One of the most comic things in the
whole Naturalist episode was the rising up of some of these disciples to
rebuke their master, in a round robin, for "right-hand and left-hand
defections" from the pure gospel of the sect.

[467] The word is used, designedly but not fraudulently, as combining
"observation" and "experiment" _to the extent proper to art_. Deliberate
and after-thought "experi_ments_" in actual life are (except in trivial
matters) very risky things; and the _Summa Rerum_ itself is apt to
resent them, as, for instance, Mr. Thomas Day and Mr. Felix Graham found
in the matter of wife-culture.

[468] _V. sup._ Vol. I. p. 278. I was much pleased to find that the
quotation considerably "put out" one of my few unfavourable critics.
"The Importance of Gastronomy in Novels" is a beautiful subject--still,
I think, virgin, though Thackeray has touched on it in others once or
twice, and illustrated it magnificently himself.

[469] For something on the opposite view, that Naturalism is
"classical," see Conclusion.

[470] That Flaubert escaped their error only so far as by fire has been
allowed. One might