discouraging, than this nightmarish work all stained with corruption, dripping blood from frightful, tragic deaths. In art there is nothing vivifying, as there is nothing living, nothing true, except the beautiful. Yet this sense of the beautiful is what he lacks.

Does his work afford us in return that documentary value which the author claims for it? Rather, the whole is vitiated by the spirit of the system, and the detail is deformed by the temperament of the writer. Moreover, upon many points even his relative exactness is more than doubtful. The greater part of his work is devoted to a historical period, from which the march of events has suddenly and completely separated us in all respects. The fall of the Second Empire, coming just as Zola was beginning the series of the RougonMacquart, condemned him to a labor henceforth as arduous as it was fruitless. In order to paint society before 1870, it happened that he was forced to utilize more recent notes and events; so that he ends by giving a true account neither of the epoch in which he was interested, nor of the subsequent years.

It were wearisome to enumerate the flagrant errors, which, among landscapes vigorously brushed in, and full of charm, and among scenes exhibited in intense relief, swarm across the pages of La Curée,' 'La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret,' 'Son Excellence, Eugène Rougon,' and 'Nana.' 'Pot Bouille' proclaims the ambition to present to the bourgeois world a faithful image of the bourgeoisie. The artifice of the composition, and the dissimilitude of many of its episodes, are constantly emphasized by a crudity of language as far as possible removed from the hypocritically decent habits of his models. Nor is he more veracious in La Terre,' when he attributes to the peasants of Beauce, speech of an exaggerated obscenity little in keeping with their customary crafty discretion. Moreover, he has scarcely been conscious of their simple dignity. He has regarded them with a gaze clouded by reading the judgments of criminal courts. He sets forth to discover in the atmosphere of their farms and stables a strange ferment of overflowing lubricity. This he imports into his book with a tranquil wantonness which provokes universal disgust, and which drove many of his chief disciples away from him. When, forcing his talent, a little later he attempted to show himself capable of a flight in the serene regions of purity,- in 'Le Rêve,' — he succeeded only in involving himself in childish improbabilities. In 'La Bête Humaine,' Lombroso, one of the masters of whom he thinks himself emulous, pointed out the weakness of his portraits of criminals; Le Docteur Pascal' completely established the nothingness of his initial assertions. The 'Histoire Naturelle et Sociale d'une Famille sous le Second Empire' represented in fact a something dead which had never lived.

XXVII-1019

For some time indeed the novelist had evinced premonitory symptoms of a certain evolution. In the new cycle of Trois Villes' (Three Cities), he does not show himself in absolute contradiction with himself. But it seems as if a kind of candid optimism had attenuated his former black pessimism, as if some vague belated sensibility had come to him. "Perhaps," he murmurs, "all is right!» At least he does not seem far from the belief that all will become so. "Let nature work," he counsels, "let us live!" And henceforth he seems to wish to apply himself to disengaging the factors of a better future. 'Lourdes' is the cry of eternal suffering, wringing from the heart of ignorant man a pitiful appeal to hopes hidden in mystery: it is the phase of superstition. Rome' is the appeal to the supernatural, the second state of human evolution; the age of faith hardened into routine, into convention, under the administrative genius of a pontificate which seems to have inherited from ancient Rome the dream of a universal empire. This dream will never be realized. The future will not belong to a church. To scientific investigation only is assured the promise of indefinite duration, and to Zola that remains the sole guardian and sole mistress of all truth. 'Paris,' the third novel of the series, will be the proclamation of the arrival of the positive and universal reign of science. In the Trois Villes,' as in the 'Rougon-Macquarts,' the usual faults of the author are seen side by side with his least disputed merits. Into the mass of hastily gathered technical details, into the confusion of notions generated by a superficial vulgarization of knowledge, he has known how to put order and movement. He sketches with an alert touch; and above all he succeeds in giving wing to his hyperbolical imagination, boundless and eager for the abnormal and fantastic.

The whole is massively but firmly established in this same spírit of simplification which inspires him in composing an action or in delineating a type. To a vast and ample outline, usually in sombre atmosphere, where are thrown up distorted silhouettes, he contributes numerous reiterated touches, often heavy additions. Accumulation, repetition - therein lies his whole method. Unlike the Goncourts, he has not the word or epithet for overruling preoccupation. His style, at the beginning rather hesitating, afterward surer and richer, is now both vigorous and careless, often monotonous, -with a frequent mixture of trivial locutions and sonorous adjectives. In short, the heavy rhythm of the sentences, the crude violence of the colors, correspond with the inspiration of his great melodramatic frescoes, of his swarming dioramas. At a distance, the falseness of detail appears less; the exaggeration less shocking. There is visible a mass animated with a dense collective life, like a monstrous organism. The masses, the crowd, have always found in Zola an almost

Homeric singer of their tumults and furies.

Their elementary and

The unacknowledged

quite instinctive psychology puts him at ease. romanticism within him evokes them with a sombre lyricism. He contemplates them with a visionary eye, he makes them stir and move in compact phalanxes with their outcries and their way of behavior. In 'Germinal,' the novel of the proletariat and of socialism, and in 'La Débâcle,' the novel of the army and of war, he has in this respect exercised a powerful mastery. Elements, natural forces, even material objects, receive from him an obscure and mysterious vitality. Under his pen the Sea, the Tavern, the Cathedral, the Store, the Machine, become real and redoubtable existences. They rule the creatures of flesh, they devour them in their anger or break them in their catastrophes. Thus one is brought back to the pure personification of savages.

And we return at the same time to that diminution of man, to that degradation of the reasonable and reflecting being, which haunts all Zola's work. He has often found a way to degrade even his humblest heroes still more by calumniating them. Under pretext of a new civilization, he denies violently all the past, destroys all that is most precious in the human patrimony. Under color of science, he persists in outraging those inseparable allies, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. "Woe," exclaimed Bossuet, "woe to the science which does not turn to love." One may apply the same sentence with still more justice to literature and art. Certainly it would not be just not to render homage to the persevering and courageous patience which attests a work ample and vast in its barbarity. The more bitterly must one deplore the too common application of this faith, this ardor, this force, to sickly exceptions, to unjustifiable vulgarities, to a conception so arbitrary, and when all is said, so insignificant.

"The victory of the idea kills the sect which propagates it," Zola has written. We can bear witness that the naturalistic sect is dead; but the idea it advanced has not conquered. Hatched in a period of crisis and transition, it responded to an abasement of taste and morals! Hence the reason of its vogue. As a whole, the work of its inventor and prophet remains isolated. Instead of showing encyclopædic and definitive, like a majestic synthesis of modern times, it appears only as a factitious edifice both apocalyptic and sordid; valuable only for some merits of imagination and composition,superficial merits which will preserve but a few fragments of it, and those discredited by the recollection of a still-echoing scandal.

Robert Vallier.

GLIMPSES OF NAPOLEON III.

From 'La Débâcle (The Downfall). Copyright 1892, by Cassell Publishing

Company

HEY had no more than sat down at table when Delaherche,

THEY

burning to relieve himself of the subject that filled his mind, began to relate his experiences of the day before. "You know I saw the Emperor at Baybel."

He was fairly started, and nothing could stop him. He began by describing the farm-house; a large structure with an interior court, surrounded by an iron railing, and situated on a gentle eminence overlooking Mouzon, to the left of the Carignan road. Then he came back to the Twelfth Corps, whom he had visited in their camp among the vines on the hillsides; splendid troops. they were, with their equipments brightly shining in the sunlight, and the sight of them had caused his heart to beat with patriotic ardor.

"And there I was, sir, when the Emperor, who had alighted to breakfast and rest himself a bit, came out of the farm-house. He wore a general's uniform and carried an overcoat across his arm, although the sun was very hot. He was followed by a servant bearing a camp-stool. He did not look to me like a well man; ah no, far from it: his stooping form, the sallowness of his complexion, the feebleness of his movements, all indicated him to be in a very bad way. I was not surprised; for the druggist at Mouzon, when he recommended me to drive on to Baybel, told me that an aide-de-camp had just been in his shop to get some medicine you understand what I mean - medicine for- The presence of his wife and mother prevented him from alluding more explicitly to the nature of the Emperor's complaint, which was an obstinate diarrhoea that he had contracted at Chêne, and which compelled him to make those frequent halts at houses along the road. "Well, then the attendant opened the campstool and placed it in the shade of a clump of trees at the edge of a field of wheat, and the Emperor sat down on it. Sitting there in a limp, dejected attitude, perfectly still, he looked for all the world like a small shopkeeper taking a sun-bath for his rheumatism. His dull eyes wandered over the wide horizon, the Meuse coursing through the valley at his feet, before him the range of wooded heights whose summits recede and are lost in the distance, on the left the waving tree-tops of Dieulet forest,

He was

on the right the verdure-clad eminence of Sommanthe. surrounded by his military family, aides and officers of rank; and a colonel of dragoons, who had already applied to me for information about the country, had just motioned me not to go away, when all at once-" Delaherche rose from his chair, for he had reached the point where the dramatic interest of his story culminated, and it became necessary to reinforce words by gestures. "All at once there was a succession of sharp reports; and right in front of us, over the wood of Dieulet, shells are seen circling through the air. It produced on me no more effect than a display of fireworks in broad daylight, sir, upon my word it didn't! The people about the Emperor, of course, showed a good deal of agitation and uneasiness. The colonel of dragoons comes running up again to ask if I can give them an idea whence the firing proceeds. I answer him off-hand: 'It is at Beaumont; there is not the slightest doubt about it.' He returns to the Emperor, on whose knees an aide-de-camp was unfolding a map. The Emperor was evidently of opinion that the fighting was not at Beaumont, for he sent the colonel back to me a third time. But I couldn't well do otherwise than stick to what I had said before, could I, now?- the more that the shells kept flying through the air, nearer and nearer, following the line of the Mouzon road. And then, sir, as sure as I see you standing there, I saw the Emperor turn his pale face toward me. Yes, sir, he looked at me a moment with those dim eyes of his, that were filled with an expression of melancholy and distrust. And then his face declined upon his map again, and he made no further movement."

Delaherche, although he was an ardent Bonapartist at the time of the plébiscite, had admitted after our early defeats that the government was responsible for some mistakes; but he stood up for the dynasty, compassionating and excusing Napoleon III., deceived and betrayed as he was by every one. It was his firm opinion that the men at whose door should be laid the responsibility for all our disasters, were none other than those Republican deputies of the Opposition who had stood in the way of voting the necessary men and money.

"And did the Emperor return to the farm-house?" asked Captain Beaudoin.

"That's more than I can say, my dear sir: I left him sitting on his stool. It was midday, the battle was drawing nearer, and