Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

EMILE ZOLA

27

represents in this way the unity of his tone and the meeting of
his extremes. If we remember that his design was nothing if
not architectural, that a " majestic whole," a great balanced
faqade, with all its orders and parts, that a singleness of mass
and a unity of effect, in fine, were before him from the first,
his notion of picking up his bricks as he proceeded becomes,
in operation, heroic. It is not in the least as a record of failure
for him that I note this particular fact of the growth of the long
series as on the whole the liveliest interest it has to offer. " I
don't know my subject, but I must live into it; I don't know
life, but I must learn it as I work "-that attitude and programme represent, to my sense, a drama more intense on the
worker's own part than any of the dramas he was to invent and
put before us.
It was the fortune, it was in a manner the doom, of Les
Rougon-Macquart to deal with things almost always in gregarious form, to be a picture of numbers, of classes, crowds, confusions, movements, industries-and this for a reason of which
it will be interesting to attempt some account. The individual
life is, if not wholly absent, reflected in coarse and common,
in generalised terms; whereby we arrive precisely at the oddity
just named, the circumstance that, looking out somewhere,
and often woefully athirst, for the taste of fineness, we find it
not in the fruits of our author's fancy, but in a different matter
altogether. We get it in the very history of his effort, the
image itself of his lifelong process, comparatively so personal,
so spiritual even, and, through all its patience and pain, of a
quality so much more distinguished than the qualities he succeeds in attributing to his figures even when he most aims at
4istinction. There can be no question in these narrow limits
of my taking the successive volumes one by one-all the more
that our sense of the exhibition is as little as possible an impression of parts and books, of particular " plots " and persons. It
produces the effect of a mass of imagery in which shades are
sacrificed, the effect of character and passion in the lump or
by the ton. The fullest, the most characteristic episodes affect