guage 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
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 foun