"Ah! I mount very high, I go very far. Like a bomb my head is filled with explosives and the lucidity of my mind grows extremely bright.... Then the novel will be vanquished: a new form of analysis will have been demonstrated. The identity of character will be affirmed by its very contradictions and something Hegelian will relieve the gloomy simplicity of ordinary creatures clothed in the rigidity of a material style. The novel of hearts, the novel of souls, the novel of bodies, the novel of all the sensibilities: after this must come the novel of minds. As I understand it, the word 'soul' represents the quintessence of heart; mind, that is to say pure intelligence in conflict with carnal inconveniences, was disdained, without doubt, as uninteresting. Always, and nothing but this, conjunctions of sexes and joy. Oh! well! quite natural! 'to possess the woman one loves.' But at last there are modern Antonies who have proposed other pur-poses to themselves, who have reduced all duties to a single duty—to conform one's life to one's dream. Passersby who jostle you proceed dreaming of the universal idealism as seriously as you of the surprises of perfected corsets. And some of them, if the beast asks for oats will answer: 'Death's white horse did not eat any of it.' And do you not suppose that if humiliating forces curve their refractory knees before a woman, they will not have, very often, recourse to the consolation of inward irony? In fine, I affirm the cerebral life—and all the rest was written in manuals of psychology.
"Irony is but a momentary protest, a mental destruction and a pledge against the excess of sensual satisfaction; it is not a certain way of liberation. From this halting-place one gradually mounts to a dominating position by pride or by contemplation, by art or by mysticism. These methods, known in their principle, are denied, like fairy-like childishness: in the novel they must be given the importance they have in daily life: As an animal, man thought only of perfecting his animalism; and Christianity was, one thinks, a notable spiritual advance. It endowed simple humanity with a complex soul. When Flaubert wrote Salammbô, he instinctively made the young priestess a Carmelite rather than a Vestal, for the Vestal obeys an order and the Carmelite a love; one is attached to her position through habit, the other through love. The idyl, the satire of customs, the picaresque romance, the tragic and fatal passion, the patriotic epic, the amorous plaint,—the ancients had no other literature: the first histories of a soul, the first analytical novel was spontaneously born in the new genius of a Christianized mind and it was Saint Augustine who wrote it. Modern literature commences with the Confessions.
"We must return to it. Zola and others may continue to catalogue their inferior animals, they have no interest for us: they are crude creatures about to acquire light, chrysalid intelligences: we are little concerned with the quality of the food with which they gorge themselves, or with their pruriencies. Whatever is not intellectual is foreign to us.
"What a disconcerting irony that in this century which drinks the blue democratic wine from the Chalice, no original prose writer was revealed who was not Christian by instinct or belief, desire or necessity, love or disgust,—from Chateaubriand to Villiers and Huysmans, and no true poet, from Vigny to Baudelaire and Verlaine!
"Comte has not touched, with his heavy stones, the souls he wanted to overwhelm,—no more than an infant who hurls tiny pebbles from the strand at the inaccessible flight of gulls! And this very age, which claims to admit only the force that is mathematically proved, will be extinguished by verbal idealism. People will no longer believe in things, but in the mere ideas we have of them; and, as the obscurity of the idea is clarified only by speech, nothing more of things will exist than the words describing them and the final destruction of matter will end with the judgment of this axiom: The universe is the sign of the word...."
"But," reflected Hubert again, as he left the café, "this, and my scorn of a derisive reality and illusive truth, does not imply laziness in art, or cowardice, or the approximate. Nor has the idealism I profess anything in common with the vague intuitions of those spinners of psychological ribbons,—it is a documented idealism, solidly erected, like the ornamented portal of a cathedral, upon the foundations of accuracy...."