Like most young men, ambitious of literary fame, he disgorges to-day what he acquired yesterday.

He has neither the time nor the patience to write carefully; he does not observe, but he listens.
Incapable of constructing a vigorously framed plot, he sometimes makes up for it by the impetuous ardor of his drawing.

He "does passion," to use a term of the literary argot; but instead of awaking ideas, his heroes are simply enlarged individualities, who excite only fugitive sympathies; they are not connected with any of the great interests of life, and consequently they represent nothing.

Nevertheless, Nathan maintains his ground by the quickness of his mind, by those lucky hits which billiard-players call a "good stroke." He is the cleverest shot at ideas on the fly in all Paris.

His fecundity is not his own, but that of his epoch; he lives on chance events, and to control them he distorts their meaning.