have been
musicians or writers, or handle the more satisfactory, if less subtle,
cinematograph.

Will there ever be a new way of seeing as well as representing life,
animate and inanimate? Who shall say? The Impressionists, working on
hints from Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, gave us a fresh view of the
universe. Rhythm in art is no new thing. In the figures of El Greco as
in the prancing horses of Gericault, rhythm informs every inch of the
canvas. The Futurists are seeking a new synthesis, and their work is
far from synthetic; it is decomposition--in the painter's sense of the
word--carried to the point of distraction. Doubtless each man has a
definite idea when he takes up his brush, but all the king's horses
and all the king's men can't make out that idea when blazoned on the
canvas. The Futurists may be for the future, but not for to-day's
limited range of vision.

XV

IN THE WORKSHOP OF ZOLA

Taine once wrote: "When we know how an artist invents we can foresee
his inventions." As to Zola, there is little need now for critical
judgments on his work. He is definitely "placed"; we know him for what
he is--a romancer of a violent idealistic type masquerading as an
implacable realist; a lyric pessimist at the beginning of his literary
career, a sonorous optimist at the close, with vague socialistic views
as to the perfectibility of the human race. But he traversed distances
before he finally found himself a field in which stirred and struggled
all human animality. And he was more Zola when he wrote Therese Raquin
than in his later trilogies and evangels. As an artist it is doubtful
if he grew after 1880; repetition was his method of methods, or, as he
once remarked to Edmond de Goncourt: "Firstly, I fix my nail, and then
with a blow of the hammer I send it a centimetre deep into the brain
of the public; then I knock it in as far again--and the hammer of
which I make use is journalism." And a tremendous journalist to the
end was Zola, despite his books and naturalistic theories.

Again, and from the diary of the same sublimated old gossip, Goncourt,
Zola speaks: "After the rarefied analysis of a certain kind of
sentiment, such as the work done by Flaubert in Madame Bovary; after
the analysis of things, plastic and artistic, such as you have given
us in your dainty, gemlike writing, there is no longer any room for
the younger generation of writers; ther