any other master, Zola has made
me think of in his frankness. Through his epicality he is Defoe's
inferior, though much more than his equal in the range and implication
of his work.

A whole world seems to stir in each of his books; and, though it is a
world altogether bent for the time being upon one thing, as the actual
world never is, every individual in it seems alive and true to the
fact. M. Brunetiere says Zola's characters are not true to the French
fact; that his peasants, working-men, citizens, soldiers are not
French, whatever else they may be; but this is merely M. Brunetiere's
word against Zola's word, and Zola had as good opportunities of knowing
French life as Mr. Brunetiere, whose aesthetics, as he betrays them in
his instances, are of a flabbiness which does not impart conviction.
Word for word, I should take Zola's word as to the fact, not because I
have the means of affirming him more reliable, but because I have
rarely known the observant instinct of poets to fail, and because I
believe that every reader will find in himself sufficient witness to
the veracity of Zola's characterizations. These, if they are not true
to the French fact, are true to the human fact; and I should say that
in these the reality of Zola, unreal or ideal in his larger form, his
epicality, vitally resided. His people live in the memory as entirely
as any people who have ever lived; and, however devastating one's
experience of them may be, it leaves no doubt of their having been.

III

It is not much to say of a work of literary art that it will survive as
a record of the times it treats of, and I would not claim high value
for Zola's fiction because it is such a true picture of the Second
Empire in its decline; yet, beyond any other books have the quality
that alone makes novels historical. That they include everything, that
they do justice to all sides and phases of the period, it would be
fatuous to expect, and ridiculous to demand. It is not their epical
character alone that forbids this; it is the condition of every work of
art, which must choose its point of view, and include only the things
that fall within a certain scope. One of Zola's polemical delusions
was to suppose that a fiction ought not to be selective, and that his
own fictions were not selective, but portrayed the fact without choice
and without limitation. The fact was that he was always choosing, and
always limiting. Even a map chooses and l