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. The unsatisfied need for the supernatural was
driving people, in default of something loftier, to spiritism and the
occult.

Now his thoughts carried him away from his dissatisfaction with
literature to the satisfaction he had found in another art, in painting.
His ideal was completely realized by the Primitives. These men, in
Italy, Germany, and especially in Flanders, had manifested the amplitude
and purity of vision which are the property of saintliness. In authentic
and patiently accurate settings they pictured beings whose postures were
caught from life itself, and the illusion was compelling and sure. From