onalities of these two, as well as those of Geversin,
Madame Bavoil, and Madame Mesurat, stand out very vividly, and make us
wish for that fuller acquaintance with them which a little more movement
and incident would have afforded.

But what will give most offence, and tend to alienate a certain amount
of intelligent and valuable sympathy, is the violence, and even the
coarseness, with which the author, or at least his hero, handles, not
only the opinions, but the very persons of those from whom he differs;
the intemperance of his invective, the narrow intolerance and absolute
self-confidence with which he sits in judgment on men and things.

As a matter of fact, this is rather a defect of style and expression
than of the inner sentiment. It is part and parcel of the realist temper
to blurt out the thought in all the clothing or nakedness with which it
first surges up into consciousness, before it has been submitted to the
censorship of reason; in a word, to do its thinking aloud, or on paper;
to give utterance not to the tempered and mature judgment--the last
result of refinement and correction, but to display the whole process
and working by which it was reached. As it is part of M. Zola's art to
linger lovingly over each little horror of some slaughter-house scene,
until the whole lives for us again as in a cinematograph, so M. Huysman,
engaged in the portrayal of a spiritual conflict, spares us no link in
the chain of causes by which the final result is produced; he bares the
brain, and exposes its workings with all the scientific calmness of the
vivisector.

Whether we like or dislike this realism, we must allow for it in forming
our judgment on these volumes, nor must we treat as final and approved
opinions what are often the mere spontaneous suggestions and first
thoughts of the mind, the oscillations through which it settles down to
rest. Over and over again we shall find that Durtal subsequently raises
the very objection to his own view that was on our lips at the first
reading of it.

But even making such allowance, it none the less remains a matter of
regret that one who, with perhaps some justice, considers that in point
of art-appreciation "the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath
the profane public," and chides them for "their incurable lack of
artistic sense," who speaks of "the frightful appetite for the hideous
which disgraces the Church of our day," who himself in many ways, in a
hundred