task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in many
cases extravagantly composed metres, and I had begun to feel that I was
working in sand, I could make no progress, the house I was raising crumbled
and fell away on every side. These stories had one merit: they were all, so
far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. For the art of telling a
story clearly and dramatically, _selon les procedes de M. Scribe_, I
had thoroughly learnt from old M. Duval, the author of a hundred and sixty
plays, written in collaboration with more than a hundred of the best
writers of his day, including the master himself, Gautier. I frequently met
M. Duval at breakfast at a neighbouring _cafe_, and our conversation
turned on _l'exposition de la piece, preparer la situation, nous aurons
des larmes_, etc. One day, as I sat waiting for him, I took up the
_Voltaire_. It contained an article by M. Zola. _Naturalisme, la
verite, la science_, were repeated some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able
to believe my eyes, I read that you should write, with as little
imagination as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was illiterate
and puerile, and that the art of M. Scribe was an art of strings and wires,
etc. I rose up from breakfast, ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a
little dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow on the head.

Echo-augury! Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying
marvellously well to the besetting difficulty of the moment. The reader who
has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word "Shelley"
had upon me in childhood, and how it called into existence a train of
feeling that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many years, until
it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the reader will
also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of the word
"France" awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how
the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the creation of a
mental existence.

And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and
inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the
new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and
I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile
eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any
semblance of life, passionless in all their passion.

I had read a few chapters of the "Assommoir