exist no less than the candle and the cloth,
the cheese and the can. Ruy Blas is now condemned as unreal because the
lovers kill themselves; the realists forget that there are lovers still
to whom that death would be possible, would be preferable, to low
intrigue and yet more lowering falsehood. They can only see the mouldy
cheese, they cannot see the sunrise glory. All that is heroic, all that
is sublime, impersonal, or glorious, is derided as unreal. It is a
dreary creed. It will make a dreary world. Is not my Venetian glass with
its iridescent hues of opal as real every whit as your pot of pewter?
Yet the time is coming when every one, morally and mentally at least,
will be allowed no other than a pewter pot to drink out of, under pain
of being 'writ down an ass'--or worse. It is a dreary prospect."

* * *

"Good? bad? If there were only good and bad in this world it would not
matter so much," said Correze a little recklessly and at random. "Life
would not be such a disheartening affair as it is. Unfortunately the
majority of people are neither one nor the other, and have little
inclination for either crime or virtue. It would be almost as absurd to
condemn them as to admire them. They are like tracts of shifting sand,
in which nothing good or bad can take root. To me they are more
despairing to contemplate than the darkest depth of evil; out of that
may come such hope as comes of redemption and remorse, but in the vast,
frivolous, featureless mass of society there is no hope."

* * *

"No!" he said with some warmth: "I refuse to recognise the divinity of
noise; I utterly deny the majesty of monster choruses; clamour and
clangour are the death-knell of music as drapery and so-called realism
(which means, if it mean aught, that the dress is more real than the
form underneath it!) are the destruction of sculpture. It is very
strange. Every day art in every other way becomes more natural and music
more artificial. Every day I wake up expecting to hear myself _denigre_
and denounced as old-fashioned, because I sing as my nature as well as
my training teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for
naturalism in other arts--we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola
instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas _fils_ instead of Corneille; we
have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the
reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and