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

EMILE ZOLA

33

Though a summary study of Zola need not too anxiously
concern itself with book after book-always with a partial exception from this remark for "L'Assommoir "-groups and varieties
none the less exist in the huge series, aids to discrimination
without which no measure of the presiding genius is possible.
These divisions range themselves to my sight, roughly speaking,
however, as scarce more than three in number-I mean if the
ten volumes of the CEuvres Critiques and the Theatre be left
out of account. The critical volumes in especial abound in the
characteristic, as they were also a wondrous addition to his sum
of achievement during his most strenuous years. But I am
forced not to consider them. The two groups constituted after
the close of Les Rougon-Macquart-" Les Trois Villes" and the
incomplete "Quatre 2tvangiles "-distribute themselves easily
among the three types, or, to speak more exactly, stand together
under one of the three. This one, so comprehensive as to be
the author's main exhibition, includes to my sense all his best
volumes-to the point in fact of producing an effect of distinct
inferiority for those outside of it, which are, luckily for his
general credit, the less numerous. It is so inveterately pointed
out in any allusion to him that one shrinks, in repeating it,
from sounding flat; but as he was admirably equipped from
the start for the evocation of number and quantity, so those of
his social pictures that most easily surpass the others are those
in which appearances, the appearances familiar to him, are at
once most magnified and most multiplied.
To make his characters swarm, and to make the great central
thing they swarm about " as large as life," portentously, heroically big, that was the task he set himself very nearly from the
first, that was the secret he triumphantly mastered. Add that
the big central thing was always some highly representative
institution or industry of the France of his time, some seated
Moloch of custom, of commerce, of faith, lending itself to portrayal through its abuses and excesses, its idol-face and great
devouring mouth, and we embrace the main lines of his attack.
In " Le Ventre de Paris " he had dealt with the life of the huge