have equal claim to decipher what former civilizations have failed to read. On the other hand, if we have been unsuccessful, ever since the world began, in piercing through that unknown, then taken as an environment that unknown has had little power in modifying man, for, if the environment is supposed to develop the human race, man ought to love differently, and hate in a new fashion; in one word, the two ebbs of the human heart, sympathy and antipathy, or to be more technical, action and reaction, which are as eternal as the ebbing of the sea, ought not to rule our existences to-day when surroundings are so utterly dissimilar to those of the primitive race. It is no doubt putting the cart before the horse to give to our environment a modifying power instead of a reflective one.

The next thing M. Zola declares in his Roman Experimental is that imagination can no longer be the gift needed by the modern novelist, but that the sense of truth is the sole attribute of the faithful reporter who views life and men as they are; the former eventless and uninteresting, the latter bourgeois and commonplace. In advancing such a paradox, M. Zola unconsciously repudiates the god who has given birth to all his work, for is not La faute de l'Abbe Mouret the highest expression of that imagination which has bequeathed to the world its finest poets and artists? And is not 'the sense of truth,' which he announces to be the only power necessary to a novelist, utterly absent from all his work?

I believe M. Zola to be his own worst enemy, and to have been playing hide-and-seek with the public for twenty years. If he means by that 'sense of truth,' or reality, the prophetic power, the divination of things that will be, or might be, which has immortalized Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, then we can agree with him; this is the only realism which we can admit, for the other, the mere observation and description of things, seen as they are, or as they happened, would reduce art to a Police Intelligence, or to a medical report in the Lancet. It is well known that truth makes the worst fiction, and it must follow that imagination, which means creative power, is necessary to infuse life into what otherwise would remain lifeless. According to M. Zola, the prize would be given to the most graphic report

of any event, and my porter, or your cook would win the day for their lack of imagination. They certainly will never see Paris as our author saw it from his window, nor will they be affected by the Lachrimæ rerum' in surroundings they do not even notice. Our environment cannot possibly act on us equally. The scent of the lime trees will affect me, or my neighbour in in different ways; to me it may recall a phase of my past life; to my neighbour perhaps only bring back the flavour of a 'tisane'; while to a third the olfactory sense will not be affected in any way.

If we could read M. Zola's novels forgetting that he introduced them to us as graphic pictures of men and women, which they are not, we should be nearer understanding him; and if we effaced the word 'naturalism' from the label hung round his neck, we should be able to exercise an unbiassed and unprejudiced judgment towards a gigantic piece of work, which would then strike us as it is, an artistic manifestation as far remote from reality as Dante's Inferno is to the report of a Company meeting.

To quote once more the Roman Experimental, our author says of that Romantique School which preceded his own, that it was' Music and nothing but music,' intending by this sweeping assertion to anathematise the lyrical flights of Hugo, Musset, Dumas, etc., etc., and to condemn their view of life and mode of developing characters. But after having read the whole of M. Zola's works, it has seemed to me that there was music, and nothing but music,' and I have often wondered where was the 'true to life' method? Not in L'Abbé Mouret, where improbable personages are made to wander in a Materialistic Paradise, renewing the Edenic Legend in a symbolical love on earth. Not in La Bête humaine, in which a railway engine is brought forward to play a human part, with a furnace heart; not in the Ventre de Paris, with its fishmarkets, meat stores, cheese counters, and pork butchers' shops as the environment of very unreal human creatures. In each of the above-named books Nature has to disappear behind the iron railings of the Halles, the glass doors of a linendraper's, the gates of a railway station. The examples would be endless; suffice it to say, that from the first

volume, La fortune des Rougons, to the last one, Paris, the author has never seen his personages from any analytical point of view, and that throughout the entire Cycle' he has only used one method, a new one, it is true, and what musicians would call the leit-motiv. To the environment he has given the part that Wagner gives to his orchestration, and to man's surroundings he has granted an anthropomorphic power, endowing it with a subjective life robbed from his dramatis personæ.

In La fortune des Rougons the leit-motiv is not yet apparent, the first volume of the series is more analytical than those which follow; he tries to view his characters impersonally and endeavours to give to each personage his proper value; but very soon he leaves the solid ground to launch into a colossal hypothesis: The history of a family under the Second Empire, in twenty volumes. And in the Curée, the Ventre de Paris Germinal, L'Assommoir, Une page d'amour, environment gives leit-motiv freely, until L'Débacle brings the curtain down and the conductor's baton is laid on the stand. Throughout the entire work the reader will have watched the evolution of M. Zola's genius, and not at all the physiological development of a family under the Second Empire. In fact, M. Zola has never written a novel in all his life with the exception of one short story, The Attack on the Mill; not even has he given us phases of human lives like M. Anatole France. We have had Paris from every standpoint from first to last he has written on that city symbolical fantasies of the highest order, and read otherwise his artistic fables must appear to the reader as fantastic and improbable as L'homme qui rit* or Gulliver's Travels. M. Zola's method is not a realistic one; far from it. Each book that has been published year after year has been more synthetic than the former one, and he has embodied ideas ever since he has put black on white. The artist is everywhere in the work; he is behind Denise's dung-heap, and the counter of the 'Bonheur des Dames;' he takes the train to Lourdes and Rome, finally returning to his favourite topic, Paris, where the Abbé Froment is the mouthpiece of all our author's thoughts. The sun rising

over Paris inspires the inmates of Gustave Froment's house to dithyrambic praise, and they all soliloquise on the future of Paris, the need of a new religion, the re-birth of Society, till finally the book closes with an apotheosis of the metropolis bathed in a symbolic sunset, the harvest of the future.

The poet in M. Zola is immortalising whole eras, and his artistic power is so great that he throws over his subjects, though modern, a glamour of classicism which lends them the remoteness of abstraction. In a few short phrases he gives us the synthesis of Papal Rome in all its fossilisation, when the Abbé Froment is wending his weary steps back to the entrance door after his fruitless visit to the Pontiff. The three vestibules he once more had to go through seemed to him darker. In the second one the Abbé Paparelli greeted him with a curt silent bow; in the first vestibule the slumbering valet did not appear even to notice him; beneath the canopy a spider was weaving its web between the tassels of the red hat.' This is but one example out of that labyrinth of symbols through which the reader has to meander in Rome; an orgy of metaphors intoxicates him, from the fantastic love of Daria and Benedetta to the small picture by Botticelli in the abbe's room; every one and every thing is intended to play a part in the book. The Vatican, the Basilica, the Catacombs, the Via Appia, are the real actors in that tragedy of Papal Italy, while the personages remain accessories whose removal from the scene would be immaterial; and the nucleus of the book lies in the daily stroll of the Pope through the gallery of antiques. The man disappears behind Papacy, and no other resource is left to that self-banished successor of Peter than to wander amidst Pagan Gods, Venuses, and Apollos. The same with regard to Lourdes. Yes, Lourdes, with its long list of diseases, its unhealthy atmosphere, is of a lyrical movement, and M. Zola has said himself that Lourdes was to represent the idea of suffering humanity, seeking relief in something outside itself; in one word, that it was the story of the foundation of all religions. In the lengthy enumeration of human ills contained Lourdes there is no pity for human depravity, no thrill for their ing sufferings; pure abstraction is the aim and end of it. touch of human nature go and look at one of Hogarth's

pictures, that one in which the dying Countess of the Mariage a la mode clasps her child in her arms. The strapped leg of the child will tell you a more tragic tale of atavism than the twentythree volumes of M. Zola, which as human documents do not possess any value. Not one of his characters has a life of his own, independent of his or her snrroundings: outside of their idiosyncracies of trade or profession they do not stand in any relation to practical life, but, similar to hieroglyphics, they explain some mystery, symbolise some idea. Is not Lise the symbol of animalism? In La belle Normande has not the fish market found its mermaid? And is not Cadine the Flora of a modern flower stall? The discordant note is thrown in when Zola brings forth a character without any symbolism, like Florent in the Ventre de Paris, a simple anarchist who walks, eats, talks automatically, receiving no outward impression nor giving anything of himself to his surroundings. There is no exchange of influence between him and his fellow creatures; he lives with and for one idea, unmodified and undeveloped throughout three hundred pages; his only peculiarity to be sensitive to the smell of fish and never to get accustomed to it, which is peculiar and contradictory in our author, who wishes us well to understand that our environment has supreme power to modify us, and to develop our tastes according to our callings. In L'Assommoir, again, he brings forward a little hero from out the mire. Lalie lives a saint's life and dies a martyr's death, though no one can well understand why, as her heredity is no better than that of Gervaise or Nana, nor is her surrounding purer. Why does her ambient environment of immorality and brutality develop her into a little martyr, when it played the deuce with Coupeau and Gervaise, who were very decent people to start with?

Environment has in M. Zola's work an artistic power only; he uses it as an effective medium, not unlike the chiaroscuro of Dutch painters, to throw a lurid light on some personages while it leaves in the shade a few of the others. Some critics have called the art of M. Zola the art of photography. I do not agree there, for photography is the reproduction of things or beings existing, and M. Zola's art is without even the semblance of life. He takes one round his gallery of stuffed creatures,