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detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length,
by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic
followers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it
signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the
conditions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France)
fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is,
perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. With a movement of
alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from
these extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked,
narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and the
poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of this
baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling story--
once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable --begin to
be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details
developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability,
childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a
railway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola
spends himself on technical successes. To afford a popular flavour
and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be
allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but
what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the
extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into
mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M.
Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible
sounds.
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