exhibition.  Lancisi’s figures show us how the great statues look when divested of their natural covering.  It is instructive, but useful chiefly as a means to aid in the true artistic reproduction of nature.  When the, hospitals are invaded by the novelist, he should learn something from the physician as well as from the patients.  Science delineates in monochrome.  She never uses high tints and strontian lights to astonish lookers-on.  Such scenes as Flaubert and Zola describe would be reproduced in their essential characters, but not dressed up in picturesque phrases.  That is the first stumbling-block in the way of the reader of such realistic stories as those to which I have referred.  There are subjects which must be investigated by scientific men which most educated persons would be glad to know nothing about.  When a realistic writer like Zola surprises his reader into a kind of knowledge he never thought of wishing for, he sometimes harms him more than he has any idea of doing.  He wants to produce a sensation, and he leaves a permanent disgust not to be got rid of.  Who does not remember odious images that can never be washed out from the consciousness which they have stained?  A man’s vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words, and the images they present cling to his memory and will not loose their hold.  One who has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading certain poems of Swift will never cleanse it to its original whiteness.  Expressions and thoughts of a certain character stain the fibre of the thinking organ, and in some degree affect the hue of every idea that passes through the discolored tissues.

This is the gravest accusation to bring against realism, old or recent, whether in the brutal paintings of Spagnoletto or in the unclean revelations of Zola.  Leave the description of the drains and cesspools to the hygienic specialist, the painful facts of disease to the physician, the details of the laundry to the washerwoman.  If we are to have realism in its tedious descriptions of unimportant particulars, let it be of particulars which do not excite disgust.  Such is the description of the vegetables in Zola’s “Ventre de Paris,” where, if one wishes to see the apotheosis of turnips, beets, and cabbages, he can find them glorified as supremely as if they had been symbols of so many deities; their forms, their colors, their expression, worked upon until they seem as if they were made to be looked at and worshipped rather than to be boiled and eaten.

I am pleased to find a French critic of M. Flaubert expressing ideas with which many of my own entirely coincide.  “The great mistake of the realists,” he says, “is that they profess to tell the truth because they tell everything.  This puerile hunting after details, this cold and cynical inventory of all the wretched conditions in the midst of which poor humanity vegetates, not only do not help us to understand it better, but, on the contrary, the effect on the spectators is a kind of dazzled confusion mingled with fatigue and disgust.  The material truthfulness to which the school of M. Flaubert more especially pretends misses its aim in going beyond it.  Truth is lost in its own excess.”