for its realism; in fact, it is recognized as one of the earliest and most brilliant 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; like Flaubert and Zola, is, as I have said, their ignoring the line of distinction between imaginative art and science.  We can find realism enough in books of anatomy, surgery, and medicine.  In studying the human figure, we want to see it clothed with its natural integuments.  It is well for the artist to study the ecorche in the dissecting-room, but we do not want the Apollo or the Venus to leave their skins behind them when they go into the gallery for