life and
flatters our positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force
and apotheosizes the cash register. With amazing humility it defers to
the nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects every
ideal, every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond. It is
so perfectly representative of bourgeois thought that it might be sired
by Homais and dammed by Lisa, the butcher girl in _Ventre de Paris_."

"Heavens, how you go after it!" said Durtal, somewhat piqued. He lighted
his cigarette and went on, "I am as much revolted by materialism as you
are, but that is no reason for denying the unforgettable services which
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
the latest book. What do you find? Simple anecdotes: murder, suicide,
and accident histories copied right out of the newspaper, tiresome
sketches