v.] THE POETRY OF UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. 157 their foul and hideous lineaments under the mask of science. And now let us come to what is the main point of M. Zola's vindication of himself, and the point with which I am most directly concerned. He humbly pleads that he is but the poor minister of a great movement of the human intellect. The literary evolution of which his school is an instrument is merely part of a vast naturalistic transformation, that for a century has been remaking European society. In an age grown "scientific," the novel, the drama, must become scientific too, and must keep to matter of fact and the needs and instincts of the bête humaine. "Nous avons tué l'idéal," says Massimilla Doni sadly, in Balzac's Gambara. Yes, exults M. Zola, we have killed the ideal; it is the great achievement of the age. For the future, in art, as in philosophy and politics, we must be altogether experimental and altogether materialist. Hence the literature which he provides supplies a want. He claims, as we have seen, that it is the only appropriate form of fiction for the Third Republic, and argues that the Third Republic will do well to recognise that truth, and to find in Nana the poetry of universal suffrage. The time has come, he says, to bring the Republic and literature face to face; to see what the one should expect from the other; to examine whether we, analysts, anatomists, collectors of human docu ments, savants who admit no authority but that of "fact," should find in the republicans of the present hour friends or enemies. For himself he does not doubt that the existence of the Third Republic is involved in the question. And, availing himself of the famous phrase of M. Thiers, he declares prophetically, "La République sera naturaliste ou elle ne sera pas." Whatever may be the value of M. Zola's vaticination, his contention that the fiction of his school is the popular artistic expression of the Revolution seems to me unquestionably true. The spirit which exhibits Nana in all the foulness of her life, and the horror of her death, for the admiration of contemporary Paris, is the same which a century ago exalted Mdlle. Candeille "of the Opera," on the altar of Notre Dame, as the living image of Reason, and sacrificed hecatombs of human victims to that deity in the Place de la Révolution. If we would apprehend the practical value of any idea we must consider it, not as expounded by the masters, but as it lives and works in the minds of the common people. No system of philosophy which makes its way into credit is without potent influence upon the masses, absolutely unacquainted though they must necessarily be with its formal expression. Insensibly it descends among them, and modifies their instincts, their sentiments, their beliefs. We know that all matter is in constant flux, that, physically considered, we have nothing of our own. I have often thought that this may have its counterpart in v.] THE VALUE OF M. ZOLA'S WRITINGS. 159 the intellectual order. However that may be, the especial value of the writings of M. Zola and his school seems to me this: that they are the most popular outcome of the Revolutionary doctrine in the sphere of æsthetics. Of course this doctrine may be presented with great literary skill and adorned with graces not its own. Mr. John Morley-to mention no others has so presented it, in a passage which I have quoted from him in a previous chapter.* M. Zola has done us this service; he has reduced it to its ultimate, its most vulgar resolution. He has supplied the most pregnant illustration known to me of the dictum that "the visible, when it rests not upon the invisible, becomes the bestial." The bestial, or something lower. I use the word with some reluctance. I do not think the beasts would like it. If we weigh the matter well, wherein lies the chief difference between civilised man and creatures beneath him in the scale of being? Is it not in the power of apprehending the necessary and universal? Not indeed that I can altogether deny to the lower animals something analogous to the rational and religious sentiments. Thus, in a dog we find the instinct of duty, the instinct of reverence and love for one of a higher order, a blind instinct of dependence, self-renunciation, consciousness of relationship to the worshipped object, his masterwho, as Lord Bacon says, is to him instead of a god or melior natura. This by the way. My *P. 83. present point is that the condition of advance in the scale of being is not merely, or chiefly, the subjugation of the external world, but emancipation from the tyranny of the senses: that the great criterion of elevation in the order of existence is whether the higher or lower self is dominant: the self of the appetites and passions, or the self of the reason and moral nature. The true law of progress is to "Move upward, working out the beast, The Revolutionary doctrine does just the reverse of this. It eliminates from man all but the ape and tiger. It leaves of him nothing but the bête humaine, more subtle than any beast of the field, but cursed above all beasts of the field. It is beyond question-look at France if you want overwhelming demonstration of it-that the issue of what M. Zola calls the Naturalistic Evolution is the banishing from human life of all that gives it glory and honour the victory of fact over principle, of mechanism over imagination, of appetites, dignified as rights, over duties, of sensation over intellect, of the belly over the heart, of fatalism over moral freedom, of brute force over justice, in a word, of matter over mind. Tell me not of its industrial triumphs in which Philistia finds a crown of rejoicing; think rather of the cost at which they are purchased. Emerson has said that there is some v.] THE TRUE MISSION OF THE ARTIST. 161 thing cruel in the aspect of any great mechanical work. Cruel indeed is the effect of machinery upon the working man. Consider how it destroys the elegance and picturesqueness of his labour; how it makes of him a mere "hand," a subordinate adjunct to a structure of wood and iron; how it condemns him to a life-long servitude of weariness and disgust, with no scope for personal initiation, no field for the exercise of one faculty of the soul. This muchvaunted industrialism is largely materialism, in its most ignominious form. It is that industry without art, which Mr. Ruskin has well called brutality. And now, since I have rejected the Revolutionary theory of art, as presented by M. Zola, it may, perhaps, be fairly expected that I should go on to state what appears to me the true mission of the artist in such an age as this. Surely his mission is not to merge art in physical science, which is its perpetual living contradiction; but in the midst of the ugly and sordid phenomena of daily life to present that image of a fairer and better world, the desire of which springs eternal in the human breast. Certain it is that the spirit of man cannot be long content with that which has not been touched and hallowed by the ideal. And surely as existence becomes more and more materialised, and glory and loveliness die away from it, and the sphere of mechanical necessity enlarges, M |