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anecdotes: murder, suicide, and

accident histories copied right out of the newspaper, tiresome sketches
and wormy tales, all written in a colorless style and containing not the
faintest hint of an outlook on life nor an appreciation of human nature.
When I have waded through one of these books its insipid descriptions
and interminable harangues go instantly out of my mind, and the only
impression that remains is one of surprise that a man can write three or
four hundred pages when he has absolutely nothing to reveal to
us--nothing to say!"
"If it's all the same to you, Des Hermies, let's speak of something else.
We shall never agree on the subject of naturalism, as the very mention
of it makes you see red. What about this Mattei system of medicine?
Your globules and electric phials at least relieve a few sufferers?"
"Hmph. A little better than the panaceas of the Codex, though I can't
say the effects are either lasting or sure. But, it serves, like anything
else. And now I must run along. The clock is striking ten and your
concierge is coming to put out the hall light. See you again very soon, I
hope. Good night."
When the door closed Durtal put some more coke in the grate and
resumed a comfortless train of thought aggravated by this too pertinent
discussion with his friend. For some months Durtal had been trying to
reassemble the fragments of a shattered literary theory which had once
seemed inexpugnable, and Des Hermies's opinions troubled him, in
spite of their exaggerated vehemence.
Certainly if naturalism confined one to monotonous studies of
mediocre persons and to interminable inventories of the objects in a
drawing-room or a landscape, an honest and clear-sighted artist would
soon cease to produce, and a less conscientious workman would be
under the necessity of repeating himself over and over again to the
point of nausea. Nevertheless Durtal could see no possibilities for the
novelist outside of naturalism. Were we to go back to the pyrotechnics
of romanticism, rewrite the lanuginous works of the Cherbuliez and
Feuillet tribe, or, worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of
Theuriet and George Sand? Then what was to be done? And Durtal,
with desperate determination, set to work sorting out a tangle of

confused theories and inchoate postulations. He made no headway. He
felt but could not define. He was afraid to. Definition of his present
tendencies would plump him back into his old dilemma.
"We must," he thought, "retain the documentary veracity, the precision
of detail, the compact and sinewy language of realism, but we must
also dig down into the soul and cease trying to explain mystery in terms
of our sick senses. If possible the novel ought to be compounded of two
elements, that of the soul and that of the body, and these ought to be
inextricably bound together as in life. Their interreactions, their
conflicts, their reconciliation, ought to furnish the dramatic interest. In
a word, we must follow the road laid out once and for all by Zola, but
at the same time we must trace a parallel route in the air by which we
may go above and beyond.... A spiritual naturalism! It must be
complete, powerful, daring in a different way from anything that is
being attempted at present. Perhaps as approaching my concept I may
cite Dostoyevsky. Yet that exorable Russian is less an elevated realist
than an evangelic socialist. In France right now the purely corporal
recipe has brought upon itself such discredit that two clans have arisen:
the liberal, which prunes naturalism of all its boldness of subject matter
and diction in order to fit it for the drawing-room, and the decadent,
which gets completely off the ground and raves incoherently in a
telegraphic patois intended to represent the language of the
soul--intended rather to divert the reader's attention from the author's
utter lack of ideas. As for the right wing verists, I can only laugh at the
frantic puerilities of these would-be psychologists, who have never
explored an unknown district of the mind nor ever studied an
unhackneyed passion. They simply repeat the saccharine Feuillet and
the saline Stendhal. Their novels are dissertations in school-teacher
style. They don't seem to realize that there is more spiritual revelation
in that one reply of old Hulot, in Balzac's Cousine Bette, 'Can't I take
the little girl along?' than in all their doctoral theses. We must expect of
them no idealistic straining toward the infinite. For me, then, the real
psychologist of this century is not their Stendhal but that astonishing
Ernest Hello, whose unrelenting unsuccess is simply miraculous!"
He began to think that Des Hermies was right. In the present

disorganized state of letters there was but one tendency which seemed
to promise better things.