I felt the "naturalisation" of the "Roses of Midnight" would prove a
difficult task. I soon found it an impossible one, and I laid the poems
aside and commenced a volume redolent of the delights of Bougival and Ville
d'Avray. This book was to be entitled "Poems of 'Flesh and Blood.'"

"_Elle mit son plus beau chapeau, son chapeau bleu_" ... and then?
Why, then picking up her skirt she threads her way through the crowded
streets, reads the advertisements on the walls, hails the omnibus, inquires
at the _concierge's_ loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, "_Que c'est
haut le cinqième_," and then? Why, the door opens, and she cries, "_Je
t'aime_."

But it was the idea of the new æstheticism--the new art corresponding to
modern, as ancient art corresponded to ancient life--that captivated me,
that led me away, and not a substantial knowledge of the work done by the
naturalists. I had read the "Assommoir," and had been much impressed by its
pyramid size, strength, height, and decorative grandeur, and also by the
immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the
different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new--the washhouse, for
example: the fight motive is indicated, then follows the development of
side issues, then comes the fight motive explained; it is broken off short,
it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again
taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness; it is worked up to
_crescendo_, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is
given forth. And I marvelled greatly at the lordly, river-like roll of the
narrative, sometimes widening out into lakes and shallowing meres, but
never stagnating in fen or marshlands. The language, too, which I did not
then recognise as the weak point, being little more than a boiling down of
Chateaubriand and Flaubert, spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its
novelty, its richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly suspect that