The unsatisfied need for the supernatural was driving people, in default of something loftier, to spiritism and the occult.
Now his thoughts carried him away from his dissatisfaction with literature to the satisfaction he had found in another art, in painting.
His ideal was completely realized by the Primitives.

These men, in Italy, Germany, and especially in Flanders, had manifested the amplitude and purity of vision which are the property of saintliness.

In authentic and patiently accurate settings they pictured beings whose postures were caught from life itself, and the illusion was compelling and sure.

From these heads, common enough, many of them, and these physiognomies, often ugly but powerfully evocative, emanated celestial joy or acute anguish, spiritual calm or turmoil.

The effect was of matter transformed, by being distended or compressed, to afford an escape from the senses into remote infinity.
Durtal's introduction to this naturalism had come as a revelation the year before, although he had not then been so weary as now of _fin de siecle_ silliness.