es were not at first in the
form we now know them. A friend and admirer of Flaubert, he followed,
broadly speaking, his method of proceeding and work; though an admirer
of the Goncourts, he did not favour their preference for the rare case
or the chiselled epithet.

Every-day humanity described in every-day speech was Zola's ideal.
That he more than once achieved this ideal is not to be denied.
L'Assommoir remains his masterpiece, while Germinal and L'Oeuvre
will not be soon forgotten. L'Oeuvre is mentioned because its
finished style is rather a novelty in Zola's vast vat of writing
wherein scraps and fragments of Victor Hugo, of Chateaubriand, of the
Goncourts, and of Flaubert boil in terrific confusion. Zola never had
the patience, nor the time, nor perhaps the desire to develop an
individual style. He built long rows of ugly houses, all looking the
same, composed of mud, of stone, brick, sand, straw, and shining
pebbles. Like a bird, he picked up his material for his nest where he
could find it. His faculty of selection was ill-developed. Everything
was tossed pell-mell into his cellar; nothing came amiss and order
seldom reigns. His sentences, unlike Tolstoy's, for example, are not
closely linked; to read Zola aloud is disconcerting. There is no music
in his periods, his rhythms are sluggish, and he entirely fails in
evoking with a few poignant phrases, as did the Goncourts, a scene, an
incident. Never the illuminating word, never the phrase that spells
the transfiguration of the spirit.

Among his contemporaries Tolstoy was the only one who matches him in
the accumulation of details, but for the Russian every detail
modulates into another, notwithstanding their enormous number. The
story marches, the little facts, insignificant at first, range
themselves into definite illuminations of the theme, just as a
traveller afoot on a hot, dusty road misses the saliency of the
landscape, but realises its perspective when he ascends a hill. There
is always perspective in Tolstoy; in Zola it is rare. Yet he masses
his forces as would some sullen giant, confident in the end of victory
through sheer bulk and weight. His power is gloomy, cruel, pitiless;
but indubitable power he has.

After the rather dainty writing of his Contes a Ninon, Zola never
reached such compression and clarity again until he wrote L'Attaque au
Moulin, in Les Soirees de Medan. To be quite frank, he rewrote
Flaubert and the Goncourts in many of his bo