ch is bound to a thesis, but reality is bound to no thesis. You
cannot say where it begins or where it leaves off; and it will not
allow you to say precisely what its meaning or argument is. For this
reason, there are no such perfect pieces of realism as the plays of
Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but do not hold themselves
bound to prove it, or even fully to state it; after these, for reality,
come the novels of Tolstoy, which are of a direction so profound
because so patient of aberration and exception.

We think of beauty as implicated in symmetry, but there are distinctly
two kinds of beauty: the symmetrical and the unsymmetrical, the beauty
of the temple and the beauty of the tree. Life is not more symmetrical
than a tree, and the effort of art to give it balance and proportion is
to make it as false in effect as a tree clipped and trained to a
certain shape. The Russians and the Scandinavians alone seem to have
risen to a consciousness of this in their imaginative literature,
though the English have always unconsciously obeyed the law of our
being in their generally crude and involuntary formulations of it. In
the northern masters there is no appearance of what M. Ernest Dupuy
calls the joiner-work of the French fictionalists; and there is, in the
process, no joiner-work in Zola, but the final effect is joiner-work.
It is a temple he builds, and not a tree he plants and lets grow after
he has planted the seed, and here he betrays not only his French school
but his Italian instinct.

In his form, Zola is classic, that is regular, symmetrical, seeking the
beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the tree. If the fight
in his day had been the earlier fight between classicism and
romanticism, instead of romanticism and realism, his nature and
tradition would have ranged him on the side of classicism, though, as
in the later event, his feeling might have been romantic. I think it
has been the error of criticism not to take due account of his Italian
origin, or to recognize that he was only half French, and that this
half was his superficial half. At the bottom of his soul, though not
perhaps at the bottom of his heart, he was Italian, and of the great
race which in every science and every art seems to win the primacy when
it will. The French, through the rhetoric of Napoleon III., imposed
themselves on the imagination of the world as the representatives of
the Latin race, but they are the least