There are subjects which must be investigated by scientific men which
most educated persons would be glad to know nothing about. When a
realistic writer like Zola surprises his reader into a kind of knowledge
he never thought of wishing for, he sometimes harms him more than he has
any idea of doing. He wants to produce a sensation, and he leaves a
permanent disgust not to be got rid of. Who does not remember odious
images that can never be washed out from the consciousness which they
have stained? A man's vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words,
and the images they present cling to his memory and will not loose their
hold. One who has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading certain
poems of Swift will never cleanse it to its original whiteness.
Expressions and thoughts of a certain character stain the fibre of the
thinking organ, and in some degree affect the hue of every idea that
passes through the discolored tissues.

This is the gravest accusation to bring against realism, old or recent,
whether in the brutal paintings of Spagnoletto or in the unclean
revelations of Zola. Leave the description of the drains and cesspools
to the hygienic specialist, the painful facts of disease to the
physician, the details of the laundry to the washerwoman. If we are to
have realism in its tedious descriptions of unimportant particulars, let
it be of particulars which do not excite disgust. 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