Blakish-Turneresque cartoons of the latest "Gospels," though they may do
so more satisfactorily, that Emile Zola had the root of the Art of
Fiction in him. But he chose to subject the bulk of the growths from
this root to something much worse than the _ars topiaria_, to twist and
maim and distort them like Hugo's Comprachicos; to load their boughs,
forbidding them to bear natural fruit, with clumsy crops of dull and
foul detail, like a bedevilled Christmas-tree. One dares say quite
unblushingly, that in no single instance[479] has this abuse of the
encyclopaedia added charm, or value, or even force to Zola's work. A man
with far less ability than he possessed could have given the necessary
touch of specialism when it _was_ necessary, without dumping and
deluging loads and floods of technicalities on the unhappy reader.

Little more need be said about the disastrous _ugliness_ which, with
still rarer exception, pervades the whole work. There are those who like
the ugly, and those--perhaps more numerous--who think they _ought_ to
like it. With neither is it worth while to argue. As for me and my
house, we will serve Beauty, giving that blessed word the widest
possible extension, of course, but never going beyond or against it.

[Sidenote: Especially in regard to character.]

A point where there is no such precedent inaccessibility of common
ground concerns Zola's grasp of character. It seems to me to have been,
if not exactly weak, curiously limited. I do not know that his people
are ever unhuman; in fact, by his time the merely wooden character had
ceased to be "stocked" (as an unpleasant modern phrase has it) by the
novelist. The "divers and disgusting things" that they do are never
incredible. The unspeakable villain-hero of _Verite_ itself is a not
impossible person. But the defect, again as it seems to me, of all the
personages may best be illustrated by quoting one of those strange
flashes of consummate critical acuteness which diversify the frequent
critical lapses of Thackeray. As early as _The Paris Sketch-book_, in
the article entitled "Caricatures and Lithography," Mr. Titmarsh wrote,
in respect of Fielding's people, "Is not every one of them a real
substantial _have been_ personage now?... We will not take upon
ourselves to say that they do not exist somewhere else, that the actions
attributed to them have not really taken place."

There, put by a rather raw critic of some seven and twenty, who was not
hi