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