f the drones, whom he
would sweep away from the human community; then Truth, as opposed to
falsehood, hypocrisy, and convention; and, finally, Justice to one and
all, in lieu of charity to some, oppression to others, and favours for
the privileged few.

All four books--'Fruitfulness,' 'Work,' 'Truth,' and 'Justice'--are to be
stories; for years ago M. Zola arrived at the conclusion that mere essays
on sociology, though they may work good in time among people of culture,
fail to reach and impress the masses in the same way as a story may do.
It is, I take it, largely on this account that Emile Zola has become a
novelist. He has certainly written essays, but he knows how
inconsiderable have been their sales in comparison with those of his
works embodying precisely the same principles, but placed before the
world in the form of novels. To criticise him as a mere story-teller is
arrant absurdity.

He himself put the whole case in a nutshell when he remarked, 'My novels
have always been written with a higher aim than merely to amuse. I have
so high an opinion of the novel as a means of expression that I have
chosen it as the form in which to present to the world what I wish to say
on the social, scientific, and psychological problems that occupy the
minds of thinking men. I might have said what I wanted to say to the
world in another form. But the novel has to-day risen from the place
which it held in the last century at the banquet of letters. It was then
the idle pastime of the hour, and sat low down between the fable and the
idyll. To-day it contains, or may be made to contain, everything; and it
is because that is my creed that I am a novelist. I have, to my thinking,
certain contributions to make to the thought of the world on certain
subjects, and I have chosen the novel as the best means of communicating
these contributions to the world.'

If critics in reviewing one or another of M. Zola's books would only bear
these declarations of the author in mind, the reading public would often
be spared many irrelevant and foolish remarks.

M. Zola's device is _Nulla dies sine linea_, and even before the
materials for 'Fecondite' were brought to him from France he had given an
hour or two each day to the penning of notes and impressions for
subsequent use. With the arrival of his books and memoranda, work began
in a more systematic way. At half-past eight every morning he partook of
a cup of coffee and a roll and butter, no