er he was a sentimental lover of
mankind and a hater of all forms of injustice.

From the conception of the work, with its general notes on its nature,
its movement, its physiology, its determination, its first sketches of
the personages, the milieu--he was an ardent adherent of Taine in this
particular--the occupations of the characters, the summary plan with
the accumulated details, thence to the writing, the entire method is
exposed in this ingenious and entertaining book of Massis. He has no
illusions about Zola's originality or the destiny of his works. Zola
has long ceased to count in literary evolution.

But Emile Zola is in the Pantheon.

ZOLA AS BEST SELLER

The publication of the number of books sold by a young American
novelist previous to his untimely taking off does not prove that a
writer has to be alive to be a best seller. If that were the case,
what about Dickens and Thackeray as exceptions? The publishers of
Dickens say that their sales of his novels in 1910 were 25 per cent
more than in 1909, and 750,000 copies were sold in 1911. In many
instances a dead author is worth more than a live one. With Zola this
is not precisely so, though his books still sell; the only interregnum
being the time when the Dreyfus affair was agitating France. Then the
source of Zola's income dried up like a rain pond in a desert. Later
on he had his revenge.

The figures for the sale of Zola up to the end of 1911 are very
instructive. His collected works number forty-eight volumes. Of the
Rougon-Macquart series 1,964,000 have been sold; other novels,
764,000; essays and various works bring the total to 2,750,000,
approximately. In a word, a few years hence Zola will easily pass
3,000,000. Nana still holds its own as the leader of the list,
215,000; La Terre, 162,000; L'Assommoir, 162,000. This would seem to
prove what the critics of the French novelist have asserted: that
books in which coarse themes are treated with indescribable coarseness
have sold and continue to sell better than his finer work, L'Oeuvre,
for example, which has only achieved 71,000. But L'Assommoir is Zola
at his best; besides, it is not such a vile book as La Terre. And then
how about La Debacle, which has 229,000 copies to its credit? The
answer is that patriotism played a greater role in the fortune of this
work than did vulgar curiosity in the case of the others. Another
popular book, Germinal, shows 132,000.

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