naturalism has rendered.

"It has demolished the inhuman puppets of romanticism and rescued our
literature from the clutches of booby idealists and sex-starved old
maids. It has created visible and tangible human beings--after
Balzac--and put them in accord with their surroundings. It has carried
on the work, which romanticism began, of developing the language. Some
of the naturalists have had the veritable gift of laughter, a very few
have had the gift of tears, and, in spite of what you say, they have not
all been carried away by an obsession for baseness."

"Yes, they have. They are in love with the age, and that shows them up
for what they are."

"Do you mean to tell me Flaubert and the De Goncourts were in love with
the age?"

"Of course not. But those men were artists, honest, seditious, and
aloof, and I put them in a class by themselves. I will also grant that
Zola is a master of backgrounds and masses and that his tricky handling
of people is unequalled. Then, too, thank God, he has never followed
out, in his novels, the theories enunciated in his magazine articles,
adulating the intrusion of positivism upon art. But in the works of his
best pupil, Rosny, the only talented novelist who is really imbued with
the ideas of the master, naturalism has become a sickening jargon of
chemist's slang serving to display a layman's erudition, which is about
as profound as the scientific knowledge of a shop foreman. No, there is
no getting around it. Everything this whole poverty-stricken school has
produced shows that our literature has fallen upon evil days. The
grovellers! They don't rise above the moral level of the tumblebug. Read