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

tMILE ZOLA

4I

fair fruits of invention intended to remove from the mouth so
far as possible the bitterness of the ugly things in which so much
of the rest of his work had been condemned to consist. The
subjects in question then are " idyllic " and the treatment
poetic, concerned essentially to please on the largest lines and
involving at every turn that salutary need. They are matters
of conscious delicacy, and nothing might interest us more than
to see what, in the shock of the potent forces enlisted, becomes
of this shy element. Nothing might interest us more, literally,
and might positively affect us more, even very nearly to tears,
though indeed sometimes also to smiles, than to see the constructor of Les Rougon-Macquart trying, " for all he is worth,"
to be fine with fineness, finely tender, finely true-trying to be,
as it is called, distinguished-in face of constitutional hindrance.
The effort is admirably honest, the tug at his subject splendidly strong; but the consequences remain of the strangest, and
we get the impression that-as representing discriminations
unattainable-they are somehow the price he paid. " Le Docteur Pascal," for instance, which winds up the long chronicle on
the romantic note, on the note of invoked beauty, in order to
sweeten, as it were, the total draught-"- Le Docteur Pascal,"
treating of the erotic ardour entertained for each other by an
uncle and his niece, leaves us amazed at such a conception of
beauty, such an application of romance, such an estimate of
sweetness, a sacrifice to poetry and passion so little in order.
Of course, we definitely remind ourselves, the whole long
chronicle is explicitly a scheme, solidly set up and intricately
worked out, lighted, according to the author's pretension, by
" science," high, dry and clear, and with each part involved
and necessitated in all the other parts, each block of the edifice,
each "' morceau de vie," physiologically determined by previous
combinations. " How can I help it," we hear the builder of the
pyramid ask, " if experience (by which alone I proceed) shows
me certain plain results-if, holding up the torch of my famous
'experimental method,' I find it stare me in the face that the
union of certain types, the conflux of certain strains of blood,
D