“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 and wormy tales, all written in a colorless style and containing not the faintest hint of an outlook on life nor an appreciation of human nature.  When I have waded through one of these books its insipid descriptions and interminable harangues go instantly out of my mind, and the only impression that remains is one of surprise that a man can write three or four hundred pages when he has absolutely nothing to reveal to us—­nothing to say!”

“If it’s all the same to you, Des Hermies, let’s speak of something else.  We shall never agree on the subject of naturalism, as the very mention of it makes you see red.  What about this Mattei system of medicine?  Your globules and electric phials at least relieve a few sufferers?”

“Hmph.  A little better than the panaceas of the Codex, though I can’t say the effects are either lasting or sure.  But, it serves, like anything else.  And now I must run along.  The clock is striking ten and your concierge is coming to put out the hall light.  See you again very soon, I hope.  Good night.”

When the door closed Durtal put some more coke in the grate and resumed a comfortless train of thought aggravated by this too pertinent discussion with his friend.  For some months Durtal had been trying to reassemble the fragments of a shattered literary theory which had once seemed inexpugnable, and Des Hermies’s opinions troubled him, in spite of their exaggerated vehemence.