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

EMILE ZOLA

37

career, to my sense, with light; it showed how he had marched
from subject to subject and had " got up " each in turn-showing also how consummately he had reduced such getting-up to
an artifice. He had success and a rare impunity behind him,
but nothing would now be so interesting as to see if he could
again play the trick. One would leave him, and welcome,
Lourdes and Paris-he had already dealt, on a scale, with his
own country and people. But was the adored Rome also to be
his on such terms, the Rome he was already giving away before
possessing an inch of it ~ One thought of one's own frequentations, saturations-a history of long years, and of how the effect
of them had somehow been but to make the subject too august.
Was he to find it easy through a visit of a month or two with
4introductions " and a Baedeker c'
It was not indeed that the Baedeker and the introductions
didn't show, to my sense, at that hour, as extremely suggestive;
they were positively a part of the light struck out by his announcement. They defined the system on which he had brought
Les Rougon-Macquart safely into port. He had had his
Baedeker and his introductions for " Germinal," for " L'Assommoir," for" L'Argent," for " La Debacle," for " Au Bonheur des Dames "; which advantages, which researches, had
clearly been all the more in character for being documentary,
extractive, a matter of renseignements, published or private, even
when most mixed with personal impressions snatched, with
enquetes sur les lieux, with facts obtained from the best authorities, proud and happy to co-operate in so famous a connection.
That was, as we say, all right, all the more that the process, to
my imagination, became vivid and was wonderfully reflected
back from its fruits. There were the fruits-so it hadn't been
presumptuous. Presumption, however, was now to begin, and
what omen mightn't there be in its beginning with such
complacency e Well, time would show-as time in due course
effectually did. " Rome," as the second volume of The Three,
Cities, appeared with high punctuality a year or two later; and
the interesting question, an occasion really for the moralist,