large proportion of its readers never think of its holding anything else.
All the phases of unhallowed passion are described in full detail. That
is what the book is bought and read for, by the great majority of its
purchasers, as all but simpletons very well know. That is what makes it
sell and brought it into the courts of justice. This book is famous for
its realism; in fact, it is recognized as one of the earliest and most
brilliant examples of that modern style of novel which, beginning where
Balzac left off, attempted to do for literature what the photograph has
done for art. For those who take the trouble to drink out of the cup
below the rim of honey, there is a scene where realism is carried to its
extreme,--surpassed in horror by no writer, unless it be the one whose
name must be looked for at the bottom of the alphabet, as if its natural
place were as low down in the dregs of realism as it could find itself.
This is the death-bed scene, where Madame Bovary expires in convulsions.
The author must have visited the hospitals for the purpose of watching
the terrible agonies he was to depict, tramping from one bed to another
until he reached the one where the cries and contortions were the most
frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No hospital physician would
have pictured the straggle in such colors. In the same way, that other
realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient suffering from delirium tremens,
the disease known to common speech as "the horrors." In describing this
case he does all that language can do to make it more horrible than the
reality. He gives us, not realism, but super-realism, if such a term
does not contradict itself.

In this matter of the literal reproduction of sights and scenes which our
natural instinct and our better informed taste and judgment teach us to
avoid, art has been far in advance of literature. It is three hundred
years since Joseph Ribera, more commonly known as Spagnoletto, was born
in the province Valencia, in Spain. We had the misfortune of seeing a