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No comment would help those to see who have eyes to see, no comment would give sight to the hopelessly blind. Goncourt's statement is eloquent and suggestive enough; I leave it a naked simple truth; but I would put by its side another naked simple truth.

"Pray hasten, for the grass where you lie is become suddenly wet and if you linger you will catch your death of cold." When I made immediately to begin with de Goncourt, Bohemond protested that I should rest a space. "Nay," I said. "I have not properly warmed up." And to de Goncourt, "Now will we have you dance and wheeze Salute!" De Goncourt's heart was not in the work.

All the then novel theories of plein air impressionism are discussed in the Zola novel, yet the work seems clumsy after Goncourt's Manette Salomon, that breviary for painters which so far back as 1867 anticipated in print, of course the discoveries, the experiments, the practice of the naturalistic-impressionistic groups from Courbet to Cézanne, Monet to Maufra, Manet to Paul Gauguin.

La Femme au 18ième siècle, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40. Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i. 295. Quoted in Goncourt's Femme au 18ième siècle, p. 378. Ib., p. 337. Mdlle. L'Espinasse's Letters, ii. 89. Madame d'Epinay's Mém., ii. 47, 48. Ib., ii. 55. Mém., Bk. iv. 327. Corr. Lit., iii. 58. Ib., 54. Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i. 378-381.

When I read, for instance, Goncourt's Journal one of the few permanently interesting memoirs the nineteenth century has left us my heart sinks at the comparison of its adequacy to life with the inadequacy of all contemporary English literature which seeks to grapple with life.

Zola had enchanted me with decoration and inebriated me with theory; Flaubert had astonished with the wonderful delicacy and subtlety of his workmanship; Goncourt's brilliant adjectival effects had captivated me for a time, but all these impulses were crumbling into dust, these aspirations were etiolated, sickly as faces grown old in gaslight.

Zola had enchanted me with decoration and inebriated me with theory; Flaubert had astonished with the wonderful delicacy and subtlety of his workmanship; Goncourt's brilliant adjectival effects had captivated me for a time, but all these impulses were crumbling into dust, these aspirations were etiolated, sickly as faces grown old in gaslight.

And then the famous collaboration; how it was talked about, written about, prayed about; and when Jules died, what a subject for talk for articles; it all went into pot. Hugo's vanity was Titanic, Goncourt's is puerile. And Daudet? Oh, Daudet, c'est de la bouillabaisse.

Goncourt's statement is suggestive, and I leave it uncommented on; but I would put by its side another naked simple truth.

Thus, losing the faculty of admiring beauty indiscriminately under whatever form it was presented, he preferred Flaubert's Tentation de saint Antoine to his Education sentimentale; Goncourt's Faustin to his Germinie Lacerteux; Zola's Faute de l'abbe Mouret to his Assommoir.