ant examples of that modern style of novel which, beginning
where Balzac left off, attempted to do for literature what the
photograph has done for art. For those who take the trouble to drink
out of the cup below the rim of honey, there is a scene where realism is
carried to its extreme,--surpassed in horror by no writer, unless it be
the one whose name must be looked for at the bottom of the alphabet,
as if its natural place were as low down in the dregs of realism as
it could find itself. This is the death-bed scene, where Madame Bovary
expires in convulsions. The author must have visited the hospitals for
the purpose of watching the terrible agonies he was to depict, tramping
from one bed to another until he reached the one where the cries and
contortions were the most frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No
hospital physician would have pictured the straggle in such colors.
In the same way, that other realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient
suffering from delirium tremens, the disease known to common speech as
"the horrors." In describing this case he does all that language can do
to make it more horrible than the reality. He gives us, not realism, but
super-realism, if such a term does not contradict itself.

In this matter of the literal reproduction of sights and scenes which
our natural instinct and our better informed taste and judgment teach us
to avoid, art has been far in advance of literature. It is three hundred
years since Joseph Ribera, more commonly known as Spagnoletto, was born
in the province Valencia, in Spain. We had the misfortune of seeing a
painting of his in a collection belonging to one of the French princes,
and exhibited at the Art Museum. It was that of a man performing upon
himself the operation known to the Japanese as hararkiri. Many persons
who looked upon this revolting picture will never get rid of its
remembrance, and will regret the day when their eyes fell upon it. I
should share the offence of the painter if I ventured to describe it.
Ribera was fond of depicting just such odious and frightful subjects.
"Saint Lawrence writhing on his gridiron, Saint Sebastian full of
arrows, were equally a source of delight to him. Even in subjects
which had no such elements of horror he finds the materials for the
delectation of his ferocious pencil; he makes up for the defect by
rendering with a brutal realism deformity and ugliness."

The first great mistake made by the ultra-realists; l