novel
with the unpretentious title, "McTeague: a Story of San Francisco."
It was a book that could not be ignored nor dismissed with a word.
There was something very unusual about it, about its solidity and
mass, the thoroughness and firmness of texture, and it came down
like a blow from a sledge hammer among the slighter and more
sprightly performances of the hour.

The most remarkable thing about the book was its maturity and
compactness. It has none of the ear-marks of those entertaining
"young writers" whom every season produces as inevitably as its
debutantes, young men who surprise for an hour and then settle down
to producing industriously for the class with which their peculiar
trick of phrase has found favor. It was a book addressed to the
American people and to the critics of the world, the work of a young
man who had set himself to the art of authorship with an almighty
seriousness, and who had no ambition to be clever. "McTeague" was
not an experiment in style nor a pretty piece of romantic folly, it
was a true story of the people--having about it, as M. Zola would
say, "the smell of the people"--courageous, dramatic, full of matter
and warm with life. It was realism of the most uncompromising kind.
The theme was such that the author could not have expected sudden
popularity for his book, such as sometimes overtakes monstrosities
of style in these discouraging days when Knighthood is in Flower to
the extent of a quarter of a million copies, nor could he have hoped
for pressing commissions from the fire-side periodicals. The life
story of a quack dentist who sometimes extracted molars with his
fingers, who mistreated and finally murdered his wife, is not, in
itself, attractive. But, after all, the theme counts for very
little. Every newspaper contains the essential subject matter for
another _Comedie Humaine_. The important point is that a man
considerably under thirty could take up a subject so grim and
unattractive, and that, for the mere love of doing things well, he
was able to hold himself down to the task of developing it
completely, that he was able to justify this quack's existence in
literature, to thrust this hairy, blonde dentist with the "salient
jaw of the carnivora," in amongst the immortals.

It was after M. Zola had completed one of the greatest and gloomiest
of his novels of Parisian life, that he went down by the sea and
wrote "La Reve," that tender, adolescent story of love and purity