him; and it seems certainly to have been denied in greater or less
measure to all her successors. But though reading and writing come by
nature, as Dogberry justly said, a taste in them may be cultivated, or
once cultivated, it may be preserved; and why was it not so among those
poor islanders? One does not ask such things in order to be at the pains
of answering them one's self, but with the hope that some one else will
take the trouble to do so, and I propose to be rather a silent partner in
the enterprise, which I shall leave mainly to Senor Armando Palacio
Valdes. This delightful author will, however, only be able to answer my
question indirectly from the essay on fiction with which he prefaces one
of his novels, the charming story of 'The Sister of San Sulpizio,' and I
shall have some little labor in fitting his saws to my instances. It is
an essay which I wish every one intending to read, or even to write, a
novel, might acquaint himself with; for it contains some of the best and
clearest things which have been said of the art of fiction in a time when
nearly all who practise it have turned to talk about it.

Senor Valdes is a realist, but a realist according to his own conception
of realism; and he has some words of just censure for the French
naturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes
even mercenarily, nasty. He sees the wide difference that passes between
this naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish; and he goes
somewhat further than I should go in condemning it. "The French
naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life."
. . . It is characterized by sadness and narrowness. The prototype of
this literature is the 'Madame Bovary' of Flaubert. I am an admirer of
this novelist, and especially of this novel; but often in thinking of it
I have said, How dreary would literature be if it were no more than this!
There is something antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there is
in modern French life; but this seems to me exactly the best possible