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,” as it appeared in La Republique des Lettres; I had cried, “ridiculous, abominable,” only because it is characteristic of me to instantly form an opinion and assume at once a violent attitude.  But now I bought up the back numbers of the Voltaire, and I looked forward to the weekly exposition of the new faith with febrile eagerness.  The great zeal with which the new master continued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which subjects the most diverse, passing events, political, social, religious, were caught up and turned into arguments for, or proof of the truth of naturalism astonished me wholly.  The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilisation, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.  In my fevered fancy I saw a new race of writers that would arise, and with the aid of the novel would continue to a more glorious and legitimate conclusion the work that the prophets had begun; and at each development of the theory of the new art and its universal applicability, my wonder increased and my admiration choked me.  If any one should be tempted to turn to the books themselves to seek an explanation of this wild ecstasy, they would find nothing—­as well drink the dregs of yesterday’s champagne.  One is lying before me now, and as I glance through the pages listlessly I say, “Only the simple crude statements of a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision.”