n together constitute technical perfection, are
to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.
What to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be
organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely
ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and
finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and
notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic
style continually re-arising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways
of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound.

In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great change of
the past century has been effected by the admission of detail. It was
inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic
Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a
duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more
ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it has
recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and
decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call
survival. With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to
fall a little back from these extremities; they begin to aspire after a
more naked, narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified,
and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of
this baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling
story--once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable--begin
to be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details developed a
particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has
led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A man of the
unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical successes.
To afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady
current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to
the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this
tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to
degenerate into mere _feux-de-joie_ of literary tricking. The other day
even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible
sounds.

This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind us of
the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All
representative art, which can be said to live, is both