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 cinquième_," 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 the very