and place it for
its greater glory in my less remarkable prose:--

"_As we gazed on the beauties thus revealed by Good, a spirit of
emulation filled our breasts, and we set to work to get ourselves up as
well as we could._"

A return to romance! a return to the animal, say I.

* * * * *

One thing that cannot be denied to the realists: a constant and intense
desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have
done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they
have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created,
how they have remodelled and refashioned the language in their untiring
striving for intensity of expression for the very osmazome of art, I am
lost in ultimate wonder and admiration. What Hugo did for French verse,
Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola, and Huysmans have done for French prose. No more
literary school than the realists has ever existed, and I do not except
even the Elizabethans. And for this our failures are more interesting than
the vulgar successes of our opponents; for when we fall into the sterile
and distorted, it is through our noble and incurable hatred of the
commonplace of all that is popular.

The healthy school is played out in England; all that could be said has
been said; the successors of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot have no
ideal, and consequently no language; what can be more pudding than the
language of Mr. Hardy, and he is typical of a dozen other writers, Mr.
Besant, Mr. Murray, Mr. Crawford? The reason of this heaviness of thought
and expression is that the avenues are closed, no new subject matter is
introduced, the language of English fiction has therefore run stagnant. But
if the realists should catch favour in England the English tongue may be
saved from dissolution, for with the new subjects they would introduce, new
forms of language would arise.

* * * * *

I wonder why murder is considered less immoral than fornication in
literature?

* * * * *

I feel that it is almost impossible for the same ear to seize music so
widely differing as Milton's blank verse and Hugo's alexandrines, and it
seems to me especially strange that critics varying in degree from Matthew
Arnold to the obscure paragraphist, never seem even remotely to suspect,
when they passionately declare that English blank verse is a more perfect