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“J’ai fait mes adieux a ma mere et je viens pour vous faire les miens and other absurdities by Ponson du Terrail amused us many a year in France, and in later days similar bad grammar by Georges Ohnet has not been lost upon us, but neither Ponson du Terrail nor Georges Ohnet sought literary suffrage, such a thing could not be in France, but in England, Rider Haggard, whose literary atrocities are more atrocious than his accounts of slaughter, receives the attention of leading journals and writes about the revival of Romance.  As it is as difficult to write the worst as the best conceivable sentence, I take this one 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.

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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.

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

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