he was creating and vivifying. Within the bounds
of his epical scheme, which was always factitious, every person was so
natural that his characters seemed like the characters of biography
rather than of fiction. One does not remember them as one remembers
the characters of most novelists. They had their being in a design
which was meant to represent a state of things, to enforce an opinion
of certain conditions; but they themselves were free agencies, bound by
no allegiance to the general frame, and not apparently acting in behalf
of the author, but only from their own individuality. At the moment of
reading, they make the impression of an intense reality, and they
remain real, but one recalls them as one recalls the people read of in
last weeks's or last year's newspaper. What Zola did was less to
import science and its methods into the region of fiction, than
journalism and its methods; but in this he had his will only so far as
his nature of artist would allow. He was no more a journalist than he
was a scientist by nature; and, in spite of his intentions and in spite
of his methods, he was essentially imaginative and involuntarily
creative.

VI

To me his literary history is very pathetic. He was bred if not born
in the worship of the romantic, but his native faith was not proof
against his reason, as again his reason was not proof against his
native faith. He preached a crusade against romanticism, and fought a
long fight with it, only to realize at last that he was himself too
romanticistic to succeed against it, and heroically to own his defeat.
The hosts of romanticism swarmed back over him and his followers, and
prevailed, as we see them still prevailing. It was the error of the
realists whom Zola led, to suppose that people like truth in fiction
better than falsehood; they do not; they like falsehood best; and if
Zola had not been at heart a romanticist, he never would have cherished
his long delusion, he never could have deceived with his vain hopes
those whom he persuaded to be realistic, as he himself did not succeed
in being.

He wished to be a sort of historiographer writing the annals of a
family, and painting a period; but he was a poet, doing far more than
this, and contributing to creative literature as great works of fiction
as have been written in the epic form. He was a paradox on every side
but one, and that was the human side, which he would himself have held
far worthier than t