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

EMILE ZOLA

39

It is marked that in each of these examples the deficiency has
been directly fatal. No stranger doom was ever appointed for a
man so plainly desiring only to be just than the absurdity of not
resting till he had buried the felicity of his past, such as it was,
under a great flat leaden slab. " Verite " is a plea for science,
as science, to Zola, is all truth, the mention of any other kind
being mere imbecility; and the simplification of the human
picture to which his negations and exasperations have here
conducted him was not, even when all had been said, credible
in advance. The result is amazing when we consider that the
finer observation is the supposed basis of all such work. It is
not that even here the author has not a queer idealism of his
own; this idealism is on the contrary so present as to show
positively for the falsest of his simplifications. In " Fecondite
it becomes grotesque, makes of the book the most muscular
mistake of sense probably ever committed. Where was the
judgment of which experience is supposed to be the guarantee
when the perpetrator could persuade himself that the lesson
he wished in these pages to convey could be made immediate
and direct, chalked, with loud taps and a still louder commentary, the sexes and generations all convoked, on the blackboard
of the " family sentiment t
I have mentioned, however, all this time but one of his
categories. The second consists of such things as " La Fortune
des Rougon," and " La Curee," as " Eugene Rougon " and
even I Nana," as " Pot-Bouille," as " L'(Euvre " and " La
Joie de Vivre." These volumes may rank as social pictures in
the narrowest sense, studies, comprehensively speaking, of the
manners, the morals, the miseries-for it mainly comes to that
-of a bourgeoisie grossly materialised. They deal with the life
of individuals in the liberal professions and with that of political
and social adventures, and offer the personal character and
career, more or less detached, as the centre of interest. " La
Curee " is an evocation, violent and " romantic," of the extravagant appetites, the fever of the senses, supposedly fostered,
for its ruin, by the hapless second Empire, upon which general