v.] THE NATURALISTIC PEDIGREE. 147 all the social problems, above all to furnish justice with solid foundations by determining experimentally questions of criminal law-is not that the most useful, the most moral, of human tasks?" Thus does he magnify his office. He disclaims, however, the honour of having introduced this new spirit into the novel and the drama. For his great forefather he claims Diderot, whom he accounts the most considerable figure of the eighteenth century, and very much in advance of it. One work of the philosophes, he thinks-a work to a great extent unconsciously executed-was to break up the old classical form of French literature, Voltaire, great destroyer as he was, being its last representative. Upon its ruins two new schools arose, the school of Diderot and the school of Rousseau, the latter essentially idealist, the former frankly positivist. Rousseau appears to him the literary ancestor of Madame de Staël, Victor Hugo, and George Sand. On the other hand, Stendhal and Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and himself, he regards as the literary successors of Diderot. This is in substance M. Zola's apology for himself and his school. And it must be admitted that there is a great deal of truth in it. I am indeed by no means prepared to accept it en bloc. There is in it much which is not true. Perhaps it may be as well to disentangle this from his verities, in order that they may be the more clearly appre hended. First, then, as to M. Zola's literary parentage. I do not deny that he does in some sort represent the movement initiated by Diderot,* and so may claim to be of his house and lineage. It has been said that the philosophy of Materialism always issues in mere filth. M. Zola furnishes a good illustration of the saying. Diderot, of course, was filthy enough, but he was something more. Sometimes the scintillations of his vast genius almost blind us to his obscenity. The Caliban of the eighteenth century, while his backward voice utters foul speeches in sad abundance, his forward voice discourses on occasion admirably well. Take for example his famous dictum which strikes at the root of M. Zola's doctrine of art: "Il faut que l'artiste ait dans son imagination quelque chose d'ultérieur à la nature." What M. Zola inherits from Diderot is the dogma that there is nothing sacred in man or in the universe, and the nauseous bestiality which is the outcome of that persuasion. His claim to number Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert among the prophets of experimental fiction appears to me to rest upon an even slenderer foundation. M. Zola professes to be nothing but a physiologist. Now, Stendhal was anything but a physiologist. M. Taine has well pointed out that sentiments, traits of character, vicissitudes of the soul, in a word, psychology, constituted the domain *Mr. Morley observes in praise of Diderot's vile novel La Religieuse, that the author "found nothing in human pathology too repulsive for examination." Diderot, vol. ii. p. 34. v.] "THE GREAT MASTER OF THE REAL." 149 in which he worked. Again, how little Flaubert can be brought within the experimental formula is forcibly shown by a recent writer. "He has been represented as a realist, a naturalist," we read in M. du Camp's Souvenirs. "There are those who have sought to see in him a literary surgeon, dissecting the passions and making a kind of post mortem of the human heart. He was the first to shrug his shoulders at this sort of thing. He was in truth a poet (un lyrique)." Yes, a poet; not indeed of a high order, for of the deepest founts of inspiration he never drank; but a great master of literary form, which he was wont to account the whole secret of his art. And what shall we say of M. Zola's attempt to shelter himself and his method under the name of Balzac? He tells us, "Balzac was the great master of the real." True; the greatest certainly in the literature of France. But there is all the difference in the world between M. Zola's unimaginative realism and Balzac's imaginative reality. Balzac is no mere copyist from the streets. To him, as to every artist worthy of the name, the living model is a means, not an end; and he was, primarily and before all else, an artist, ever working in the spirit of his own dictum that art is idealised creation. An artist is one who reproduces the world in his own image and likeness. And in the Comédie Humaine we have a colossal fresco in which the society of the first half of the century is painted for us with pitiless accuracy and terrible pathos, as by the brush of Michael Angelo: a Titanesque work, described with equal grandeur and truth by Victor Hugo in his superb funeral oration on its author as "livre vivant, lumineux, profond, où l'on voit aller et venir, et marcher, et se mouvoir, avec je ne sais quoi d'effaré et de terrible, mêlé au réel, toute notre civilisation contemporaine; livre qui est l'observation et qui est l'imagination; et qui par moments, à travers toutes les réalitiés brusquement et largement déchirées, laisse tout à coup entrevoir le plus sombre et le plus tragique idéal." Like the great Florentine, Balzac was indeed an anatomist, and owed his vast technical skill to dissection; and, like him, he parades his science too much. But where his scalpel has destroyed, his brush recreates; and with what accuracy of detail, what force of conception, what depth of colour, what prophetic divination! His figures present that almost perfect union of type with character which is the highest note of the poet. They are instinct with life; they become to us, as they were to him, more real than the men and women of the phenomenal world; and no wonder, for genius holds of the noumenal. I know, and I by no means seek to extenuate, the blots which disfigure the work of this incomparable master. The ideal with him too often falls into the mud. King as he is among French artists in romantic fiction, his royal robes cover a cancer at the heart. M. Zola is wholly eaten up by that cancerous taint. Above the mud he never rises; it is his native element. v.] THE PARALLEL WITH VIVISECTION. 151 So much has he in common with the author of the Comédie Humaine. 66 L'imagination de Balzac m'irrite," he complains. No wonder. But it is precisely that rich and puissant imagination which specially marks off Balzac from the "experimental" school. M. Zola seems, indeed, to have caught a glimpse of this verity. "Peut-être," he writes, "si Balzac pourrait nous lire, nous renierait-t-il ”:— "Thus he, for then a ray of reason stole Half through the solid darkness of his soul." M. Zola's literary pedigree must then, I think, be pronounced for the most part spurious. But the parallel which he has drawn between his school in literature and the school in medicine of which Claude Bernard was the great light, appears to be fair enough. The attempt to determine ethical and jurisprudential problems by means of physiological fiction seems entitled to precisely the same amount of respect as the attempt to discover the secrets of physical life by torturing animals in a physiological laboratory. One of the claims most commonly made for vivisection is this: that by the observation of symptons artificially produced in sound animal organisms, we may arrive at a knowledge of the causes of natural symptons in unsound human organisms; for example, that by studying the phenomena of death by heat in a rabbit baked alive, we may understand the mechanism of febrile disturbances in a man. This claim |