But those men were artists, honest, seditious, and aloof, and I put them in a class by themselves.

I will also grant that Zola is a master of backgrounds and masses and that his tricky handling of people is unequalled.

Then, too, thank God, he has never followed out, in his novels, the theories enunciated in his magazine articles, adulating the intrusion of positivism upon art.

But in the works of his best pupil, Rosny, the only talented novelist who is really imbued with the ideas of the master, naturalism has become a sickening jargon of chemist's slang serving to display a layman's erudition, which is about as profound as the scientific knowledge of a shop foreman.

No, there is no getting around it.