Certainly if naturalism confined one to monotonous studies of mediocre persons and to interminable inventories of the objects in a drawing-room or a landscape, an honest and clear-sighted artist would soon cease to produce, and a less conscientious workman would be under the necessity of repeating himself over and over again to the point of nausea.  Nevertheless Durtal could see no possibilities for the novelist outside of naturalism.  Were we to go back to the pyrotechnics of romanticism, rewrite the lanuginous works of the Cherbuliez and Feuillet tribe, or, worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of Theuriet and George Sand?  Then what was to be done?  And Durtal, with desperate determination, set to work sorting out a tangle of confused theories and inchoate postulations.  He made no headway.  He felt but could not define.  He was afraid to.  Definition of his present tendencies would plump him back into his old dilemma.

“We must,” he thought, “retain the documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the compact and sinewy language 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!”