islanders?  One does not ask such things in order to be at the pains of answering them one’s self, but with the hope that some one else will take the trouble to do so, and I propose to be rather a silent partner in the enterprise, which I shall leave mainly to Senor Armando Palacio Valdes.  This delightful author will, however, only be able to answer my question indirectly from the essay on fiction with which he prefaces one of his novels, the charming story of ‘The Sister of San Sulpizio,’ and I shall have some little labor in fitting his saws to my instances.  It is an essay which I wish every one intending to read, or even to write, a novel, might acquaint himself with; for it contains some of the best and clearest things which have been said of the art of fiction in a time when nearly all who practise it have turned to talk about it.

Senor Valdes is a realist, but a realist according to his own conception of realism; and he has some words of just censure for the French naturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes even mercenarily, nasty.  He sees the wide difference that passes between this naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish; and he goes somewhat further than I should go in condemning it.  “The French naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life.” . . .  It is characterized by sadness and narrowness.  The prototype of this literature is the ‘Madame Bovary’ of Flaubert.  I am an admirer of this novelist, and especially of this novel; but often in thinking of it I have said, How dreary would literature be if it were no more than this!  There is something antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there is in modern French life; but this seems to me exactly the best possible reason for its being.  I believe with Senor Valdes that “no literature can live long without joy,” not because of its mistaken aesthetics, however, but because no civilization can live long without joy.  The expression of French life will change when French life changes; and French naturalism is better at its worst than French unnaturalism at its best.  “No one,” as Senor Valdes truly says, “can rise from the perusal of a naturalistic book . . . without a vivid desire to escape” from the wretched world depicted in it, “and a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in it.  Naturalistic art, then, is not immoral in itself, for then it would not merit the name of art; for though it is not the business of art to preach morality, still I think that, resting on a divine and spiritual principle, like the idea of the beautiful, it is perforce moral.  I hold much more immoral other books which, under a glamour of something spiritual and beautiful and sublime, portray the vices in which we are allied to the beasts.  Such, for example, are the works of Octave Feuillet, Arsene Houssaye, Georges Ohnet, and other contemporary novelists much in vogue among the higher classes of society.”