hich must have words with
new meanings and forms, innovations in phrases and words for their
complex needs.

At Rome, the dying paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted
its language with Ausonius, with Claudian and Rutilius whose
attentive, scrupulous, sonorous and powerful style presented, in its
descriptive parts especially, reflections, hints and nuances bearing
an affinity with the style of de Goncourt.

At Paris, a fact unique in literary history had been consummated. That
moribund society of the eighteenth century, which possessed painters,
musicians and architects imbued with its tastes and doctrines, had not
been able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dying
elegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. It had
been necessary to await the arrival of de Goncourt (whose temperament
was formed of memories and regrets made more poignant by the sad
spectacle of the intellectual poverty and the pitiful aspirations of
his own time) to resuscitate, not only in his historical works, but
even more in _Faustin_, the very soul of that period; incarnating its
nervous refinements in this actress who tortured her mind and her
senses so as to savor to exhaustion the grievous revulsives of love
and of art.

With Zola, the nostalgia of the far-away was different. In him was no
longing for vanished ages, no aspiring toward worlds lost in the night
of time. His strong and solid temperament, dazzled with the luxuriance
of life, its sanguine forces and moral health, diverted him from the
artificial graces and painted chloroses of the past century, as well
as from the hierarchic solemnity, the brutal ferocity and misty,
effeminate dreams of the old orient. When he, too, had become obsessed
by this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing less than poetry
itself, of shunning the contemporary world he was studying, he had
rushed into an ideal and fruitful country, had dreamed of fantastic
passions of skies, of long raptures of earth, and of fecund rains of
pollen falling into panting organs of flowers. He had ended in a
gigantic pantheism, had created, unwittingly perhaps, with this
Edenesque environment in which he placed his Adam and Eve, a marvelous
Hindoo poem, singing, in a style whose broad, crude strokes had
something of the bizarre brilliance of an Indian painting, the song of
the flesh, of animated living matter revealing, to the human creature,
by its passion for reproduction the forbidde