Excerpt from A Living Lie: Mensongs

For them the whole question resolves itself into this they must look the bare realities of life full in the face, reproduce them with absolute fidelity, and reject nothing they find it should be their aim to produce a work of truth rather than a work of beauty. That is why Balzac, for example, did not hesitate, in Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, ' and in La Cousine Bette, ' to lay bare with the brutal bluntness of a police report the lowest depths of Parisian vice. That, too, is why Flaubert had no compunction in placing before the readers of his Madame Bovary the repulsive picture of Emma and Léon meeting in a house of ill-fame in Rouen. In his conception of imaginative literature the writer takes no heed of what will please or displease, what will comfort or afflict, what will affect or disgust.

His aim is to add one document more to the mass of information concerning mankind and society collected by physiology, psychology, and the history of languages, creeds, and institutions. The novelist is merely a chronicler of actual life, and the value of his testimony lies in its truth.

It is easy to see, as I shall presently prove, that these aesthetics are intimately related to that great principle of intellectual conscientiousness which, under the name of science, animates the present age; and this relationship would in itself endow with idealism an art which has apparently no ideal. But a big objection to these theories has long been formulated - an objection that seems to spring up most readily in English minds when confronted with the bold utterances such theories authorise. The novel, it is said, necessarily appeals to the popular taste and places its impress upon the imagination of readers who are totally devoid of the ideal impartiality of those who take up a scientific standpoint. When such readers dip into a work like Splendeurs et Miseres or Madame Bovary, ' they at once enter into the very life and spirit with which these books are permeated. The author's genius, reproducing in vivid colours scenes of questionable morality, makes them almost real, and to man, naturally imitative, such studies form a standing danger. If a bad example is contagious in real life, surely, it is urged, it is none the less so when enhanced by the magic of a master's style.

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