nciples of the human mind, the love of the
natural and the love of the unnatural, the real and the unreal, the
truthful and the fanciful, are inalienable and indestructible.

I

Zola embodied his ideal inadequately, as every man who embodies an
ideal must. His realism was his creed, which he tried to make his
deed; but, before his fight was ended, and almost before he began to
forebode it a losing fight, he began to feel and to say (for to feel,
with that most virtuous and voracious spirit, implied saying) that he
was too much a romanticist by birth and tradition, to exemplify realism
in his work. He could not be all to the cause he honored that other
men were--men like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and
Tolstoy, and Galdos and Valdes--because his intellectual youth had been
nurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time.
He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets were
romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored. He was
that pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches,
who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith. Zola
was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He conceived of
reality poetically and always saw his human documents, as he began
early to call them, ranged in the form of an epic poem. He fell below
the greatest of the Russians, to whom alone he was inferior, in
imagining that the affairs of men group themselves strongly about a
central interest to which they constantly refer, and after whatever
excursions definitely or definitively return. He was not willingly an
epic poet, perhaps, but he was an epic poet, nevertheless; and the
imperfection of his realism began with the perfection of his form.
Nature is sometimes dramatic, though never on the hard and fast terms
of the theatre, but she is almost never epic; and Zola was always epic.
One need only think over his books and his subjects to be convinced of
this: "L'Assommoir" and drunkenness; "Nana" and harlotry; "Germinale"
and strikes; "L'Argent" and money getting and losing in all its
branches; "Pot-Bouille" and the cruel squalor of poverty; "La Terre"
and the life of the peasant; "Le Debacle" and the decay of imperialism.
The largest of these schemes does not extend beyond the periphery
described by the centrifugal whirl of its central motive, and the least
of the Rougon-Macquart series is of the same epicality as the grandest.
Ea