of the
realistic school. The scientific tendency of the period was to rely not
on previously accepted propositions, but on observation and experience,
or on facts and documents. To Zola the voice of science conveyed the
word of ultimate truth, and with desperate earnestness he set out to
apply its methods to literary production. His position was that the
novelist is, like the scientist, an observer and an experimentalist
combined. The observer, he says, gives the facts as he has observed
them, fixes the starting-point, lays the solid ground on which
his characters are to walk and his phenomena to develop. Then the
experimentalist appears and starts the experiment, that is to say, he
makes the personages in a particular story move, in order to show that
the succession of events will be just what the determinism of phenomena
together with study demand that they should be. The author must abstain
from comment, never show his own personality, and never turn to the
reader for sympathy; he must, as Mr. Andrew Lang has observed, be as
cold as a vivisectionist at a lecture. Zola thought the application
of this method would raise the position of the novel to the level of
a science, and that it would become a medium for the expression of
established truths. The fallacy of the argument has been exposed by
more than one critic. It is self-evident that the "experiments" by the
novelist cannot be made on subjects apart from himself, but are made by
him and in him; so that they prove more regarding his own temperament
than about what he professes to regard as the inevitable actions of
his characters. The conclusion drawn by a writer from such actions must
always be open to the retort that he invented the whole himself and
that fiction is only fiction. But to Zola in the late sixties the theory
seemed unassailable and it was upon it that he founded the whole edifice
of _Les Rougon-Macquart_. The considerations then that influenced Zola
in beginning a series of novels connected by subject into one gigantic
whole were somewhat various. There was the example of Balzac's great
_Comedie Humaine_; there was the desire of working out the theories of
heredity in which he had become interested; there was the opportunity of
putting into operation the system which he had termed _naturalisme_;
and there was also the consideration that if he could get a publisher to
agree to his proposals he would secure a certain income for a number of
years. His