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

EMILE ZOLA

29

numerous strings. His business was to make these strings
sound true, and there were none that he did not, so far as his
general economy permitted, persistently try. What happened
then was that many-say about half, and these, as I have noted,
the most silvered, the most golden-refused to give out their
music. They would only sound false, since (as with all his
earnestness he must have felt) he could command them,
through want of skill, of practice, of ear, to none of the right
harmony. What therefore was more natural than that, still splendidly bent on producing his illusion, he should throw himself
on the strings he might thump with effect, and should work
them, as our phrase is, for all they were worth c' The nature of
man, he had plentiful warrant for holding, is an extraordinrry
mixture, but the great thing was to represent a sufficient part
of it to show that it was solidly, palpably, commonly the nature.
With this preoccupation he doubtless fell into extravagancethere was clearly so much to lead him on. The coarser side of
his subject, based on the community of all the instincts, was
for instance the more practicable side, a sphere the vision of
which required but the general human, scarcely more than the
plain physical, initiation, and dispensed thereby conveniently
enough with special introductions or revelations. A free entry
into this sphere was undoubtedly compatible with a youthful
career as hampered right and left even as Zola's own.
He was in prompt possession thus of the range of sympathy
that he could cultivate, though it must be added that the complete exercise of that sympathy might have encountered an
obstacle that would somewhat undermine his advantage. Our
friend might have found himself able, in other words, to pay to
the instinctive, as I have called it, only such tribute as protesting taste (his own dose of it) permitted. Yet there it was again
that fortune and his temperament served him. Taste as he
knew it, taste as his own constitution supplied it, proved to
have nothing to say to the matter. His own dose of the precious
elixir had no perceptible regulating power. Paradoxical as the
remark may sound, this accident was positively to operate as