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."
I return to my thoughts on the relations of imaginative art in all its forms with science. The subject which in the hands of the scientific student is handled decorously,--reverently, we might almost say,--becomes repulsive, shameful, and debasing in the unscrupulous manipulations of the low-bred man of letters.
I confess that I am a little jealous of certain tendencies in our own American literature, which led one of the severest and most outspoken of our satirical fellow-countrymen, no longer living to be called to account for it, to say; in a moment of bitterness, that the mission of America was to vulgarize mankind. I myself have sometimes wondered at the pleasure some Old World critics have professed to find in the most lawless freaks of New World literature. I have questioned whether their delight was not like that of the Spartans in the drunken antics of their Helots. But I suppose I belong to another age, and must not attempt to judge the present by my old-fashioned standards.
The company listened very civilly to these remarks, whether they agreed with them or not. I am not sure that I want all the young people to think just as I do in matters of critical judgment. New wine does not go well into old bottles, but if an old cask has held good wine, it may improve a crude juice to stand awhile upon the lees of that which once filled it.
I thought the company had had about enough of this disquisition.
They listened very decorously, and the Professor, who agrees very well with me, as I happen to know, in my views on this business of realism, thanked me for giving them the benefit of my opinion.
The silence that followed was broken by Number Seven's suddenly exclaiming,--"I should like to boss creation for a week!"
This expression was an outbreak suggested by some train of thought which Number Seven had been following while I was discoursing. I do not think one of the company looked as if he or she were shocked by it as an irreligious or even profane speech. It is a better way always, in dealing with one of those squinting brains, to let it follow out its own thought. It will keep to it for a while; then it will quit the rail, so to speak, and run to any side-track which may present itself.
"What is the first thing you would do?" asked Number Five in a pleasant, easy way.
"The first thing? Pick out a few thousand of the best specimens of the best races, and drown the rest like so many blind puppies."
"Why," said she, "that was tried once, and does not seem to have worked very well."
"Very likely. You mean Noah's flood, I suppose. More people nowadays, and a better lot to pick from than Noah had."
"Do tell us whom you would take with you," said Number Five.
"You, if you would go," he answered, and I thought I saw a slight flush on his cheek. "But I didn't say that I should go aboard the new ark myself. I am not sure that I should. No, I am pretty sure that I shouldn't. I don't believe, on the whole, it would pay me to save myself. I ain't of much account. But I could pick out some that were."
And just now he was saying that he should like to boss the universe!
All this has nothing very wonderful about it. Every one of us is subject to alternations of overvaluation and undervaluation of ourselves. Do you not remember soliloquies something like this?
"Was there ever such a senseless, stupid creature as I am? How have I managed to keep so long out of the idiot asylum? Undertook to write a poem, and stuck fast at the first verse. Had a call from a friend who had just been round the world. Did n't ask him one word about what he had seen or heard, but gave him full details of my private history, I having never been off my own hearth-rug for more than an hour or two at a time, while he was circumnavigating and circumrailroading the globe. Yes, if anybody can claim the title, I am certainly the prize idiot." I am afraid that we all say such things as this to ourselves at times. Do we not use more emphatic words than these in our self-depreciation? I cannot say how it is with others, but my vocabulary of self-reproach and humiliation is so rich in energetic expressions that I should be sorry to have an interviewer present at an outburst of one of its raging geysers, its savage soliloquies. A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb uppermost, and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down. Number Seven is very much like other people in this respect,--very much like you and me.
This train of reflections must not carry me away from Number Seven.
"If I can't get a chance to boss this planet for a week or so," he began again, "I think 1 could write its history,--yes, the history of the world, in less compass than any one who has tried it so far."
"You know Sir Walter Raleigh's 'History of the World,' of course?" said the Professor.
