Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/265

 individual or a nation. From a noble thought—from a selfless pure ideal—what great actions spring! Herein should the responsibility of Literature be realized. The Ishbosheth, with their "strong" books, have their criminal part in the visible putrescence of a certain section of society known as the "swagger set." Perhaps no more forcible illustration of the repulsion exercised by nature itself to spiritual and literary disease could be furnished than by the death of the French "realist" Zola. Capable of fine artistic work, he prostituted his powers to the lowest grade of thought. From the dust-hole of the frail world's ignorance and crime he selected his olla-podrida of dirty scrapings, potato-peelings, candle-ends, rank fat, and cabbage water, and set them all to seethe in the fire of his brain, till they emitted noxious poison, and suffocating vapours calculated to choke the channels of every aspiring mind and idealistic soul. Nature revenged herself upon him by permitting him to be likewise asphyxiated—only in the most prosy and "realistic" manner. It was one of those terribly grim jests which she is fond of playing off on those who blaspheme her sacred altars. A certain literary aspirant hovering on the verge of the circle of the Ishbosheth, complained the other day of a great omission in the biography of one of his dead comrades of the pen. "They should have mentioned," he said, "that he allowed his body to swarm with vermin!" This is true Ishbosheth art. Suppress the fact that the dead man had good in him, that he might have been famous had he lived, that he had some notably strong points in his character, but don't forget,