As a matter of fact, this is rather a defect of style and expression than of the inner sentiment. It is part and parcel of the realist temper to blurt out the thought in all the clothing or nakedness with which it first surges up into consciousness, before it has been submitted to the censorship of reason; in a word, to do its thinking aloud, or on paper; to give utterance not to the tempered and mature judgment--the last result of refinement and correction, but to display the whole process and working by which it was reached. As it is part of M. Zola's art to linger lovingly over each little horror of some slaughter-house scene, until the whole lives for us again as in a cinematograph, so M. Huysman, engaged in the portrayal of a spiritual conflict, spares us no link in the chain of causes by which the final result is produced; he bares the brain, and exposes its workings with all the scientific calmness of the vivisector. Whether we like or dislike this realism, we must allow for it in forming our judgment on these volumes, nor must we treat as final and approved opinions what are often the mere spontaneous suggestions and first thoughts of the mind, the oscillations through which it settles down to rest. Over and over again we shall find that Durtal subsequently raises the very objection to his own view that was on our lips at the first reading of it. But even making such allowance, it none the less remains a matter of regret that one who, with perhaps some justice, considers that in point of art-appreciation "the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public," and chides them for "their incurable lack of artistic sense," who speaks of "the frightful appetite for the hideous which disgraces the Church of our day," who himself in many ways, in a hundred passages of sublime thought, of tender piety, of lyrical poesy, has proved beyond all cavil his delicacy of sentiment, his exquisite niceness in matters of taste, his reverence for what is chaste and beautiful, should at times be so deplorably unfaithful to his better instincts, so forgetful of the close and inseparable alliance between restraint and elegance. What can be weaker or uglier, more unbecoming an artist, more becoming a fish-wife, than his description of Lochner's picture of the Virgin: "The neck of a heifer, and flesh like cream or hasty-pudding, that quivers when it is touched;" or of the picture of St. Ursula's companions, by the same hand: "Their squab noses poking out of bladders of lard that did duty for their faces;" not to speak of the characterization of a "Sacred Heart" too revolting to reproduce? Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with "muck, wine-sauce, and mud," it is difficult not to answer with a _tu quoque_ as far as this word-painting is concerned--difficult not to see here some morbid and "frightful appetite for the hideous" struggling with the healthy appetite for better things.