man in the social order which he has himself produced, which he daily modifies, and in the bosom of which he undergoes a constant transformation— such is the theory of the experimental novel. In like manner the experimental drama must be a material evocation of life on the stage; and who can now doubt the possibility of effecting this by the art of the scene-painter and the upholsterer ? No: "après les décors si puissants de relief, si surprenants de vérité" (possibly M. Zola was thinking of the nine tableaux in Nana which I have described) "on ne peut nier la possibilité d'évoquer à la scène la réalité des milieux." So too the language must be "real"-the language of the street -un morceau de rue. The old notion of a style differing from that of common life, more sonorous, more nervous, more highly pitched, more finely cut, is an abomination to M. Zola, and it must be allowed that he scrupulously avoids it. With equal care he eschews idealism and poetry, which he calls lyrism, and of which, he tells us, literature is 66 rotting." Invention must be used as sparingly as possible and must be confined to the plot, which, however, is to be strictly kept within the limits of every-day life. The rest he will have to be mere copying-a transcript of facts. Formerly the greatest compliment you could pay a novelist or playwright was to say, "He has a great deal of imagination." If such a speech were addressed v.] TWO VIEWS OF NATURE. 143 to M. Zola he would regard himself as a very illused gentleman. Such, in M. Zola's own words, is the theory of the novelistic and dramatic art, as of all other art, presented to us by Naturalism. Of course there is nothing new in his contention that art must be the minister, the interpreter of nature; that its function is to create the image and symbol of that which is. What is peculiar to the Revolutionary æstheticism is its conception of Nature. Formerly men looked upon phenomena as the visible expression of an invisible reality. Thus to our Aryan ancestors the universe was no dead thing. Its substance was held to be intelligence. It was, in Goethe's phrase, "der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid;" Deity's living robe. Its beauty, its bounty, its terror were revelations. The hymns wherein the rishis sought out the thousand - branched mystery, through the vision of their hearts," were attributed to "the promptings of the thoughtful gods." So in ancient Hellas, the sense of the beautiful was the sense of the divine. The poetic gift was conceived of as inspiration. When Homer said, άeɩde Oeά— "Sing, O goddess!"— he meant what he said. Visible loveliness was referred to an invisble type. Phidias was no mere copyist of phenomena: he worked from within. Ipsius in mente insidebat specise pulchritudinis eximia quædam," Cicero well 66 66 says. Again, Christianity, accentuating the conflict between the inferior instincts and the higher aspirations, between the spiritual and the material, and proclaiming the absolute supremacy of the soul, compelled even things of the contrary order to put on the semblance of the supersensuous. I need not dwell upon what is so familiar. Speaking generally we may say, that from the very dawn of the intellectual development of our race until the middle of the last century, men had looked upon external nature as a veil, a parable, a sacrament. The conviction that behind the world of form, of colour, of extension there is a reality of which phenomena are the shadows was formerly the life of art. Its function was conceived to be the union of spiritual substance and material symbol. To eliminate the accidental, the transitory, the superfluous, to penetrate through innumerable vain details, that rank parasitic growth, "heavy as frost and deep almost as life," to find the type and to body it forth -such was the office of the artist. This view has been succinctly stated by Balzac in his profoundly philosophic study, Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu. "The mission of art," he makes Maître Frenhofer say, "is not to copy nature, but to express it. We have to seize the spirit, the soul, the physiognomy of things. Effects! They are but the accidents of life, not life itself." But art was held to be life, to be idealised creation. And this in its latest form of the novel as much as in its earliest of painting. Springing into notice in the last century, romantic v.] TWO KINDS OF ESTHETICISM. 145 fiction has gradually taken a large place in the literature of our age as one, and perhaps the most distinctive, of its legitimate forms. It is, in fact, mainly a development of the drama. The modern novel might with strict accuracy be called an unacted play, and the modern play an acted novel. Both have been regarded as essentially works of imagination, and so as subject to the same great laws and immutable principles which rule throughout the whole domain of art. So much as to the difference between the old and the new æstheticism. The one was poetical, and in dealing with the commonest realities of life was "quick to recognise the moral properties and scope of things," using sensible forms to body forth their inner sigificance. The other claims to be scientific, and proposes as its object the study of the human animal-la bête humaine-subject to the action of its environment, the compulsion of heredity, the fatality of instinct. The one is dominated by the ideal, and in a true sense is, and cannot help being, religious. The other is strictly materialistic and frankly professes atheism. M. Zola is not surprised that "classicalists" and "romanticists" "drag him in the mud." "I quite see the reason," he writes. "It is because we deny their bon Dieu, we empty their heaven, we take no account of the ideal, we do not refer everything to that abstraction." Even the cult of beauty he repudiates as heartly as all other worship. It is suspect" to him, as holding of Theism. 66 L "That 66 religion," he tells us, "does not exist apart from |