e is nothing left for them to
do, ... there no longer remains a single type to portray. The only way
of appealing to the public is by strong writing, powerful creations,
and by the number of volumes given to the world." Theory-ridden Zola's
polemical writings, like those of Richard Wagner's, must be set down
to special pleading.

Certainly Zola gave the world a number of volumes, and, if the writing
was not always "strong"--his style is usually mediocre--the subjects
were often too strong for polite nostrils. As Henri Massis, the author
of an interesting book, How Zola Composed His Novels, says, "he
founded his work on a theory which is the most singular of mistakes."
The "experimental" novel is now a thing as extinct as the dodo, yet
what doughty battles were fought for its shapeless thesis. The truth
is that Zola invented more than he observed. He was myopic, not a
trained scrutiniser, and Huysmans, once a disciple, later an opponent
of the "naturalistic" documents, maliciously remarked that Zola went
out carriage riding in the country, and then wrote La Terre.
Turgenieff declared that Zola could describe sweat on a human back,
but never told us what the human thought. And in a memorable passage,
Huysmans couches his lance against the kind of realism Zola
represented, admitting the service performed by that romancer: "We
must, in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola,
but it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another
road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve
thus a spiritualistic naturalism."

Mr. Massis has had access to the manuscripts of Zola deposited by his
widow in the National Library, Paris. They number ninety volumes; the
dossier alone of Germinal forms four volumes of five hundred pages.
Such industry seems fabulous. But, if it did not pass Zola through the
long-envied portals of the Academy, it has won for his ashes such an
honourable resting-place as the Pantheon. There is irony in the pranks
of the Zeitgeist. Zola, snubbed at every attempt he made to become an
Immortal (unlike his friend Daudet, he openly admitted his
candidature, not sharing with the author of Sapho his sovereign
contempt for the fauteuils of the Forty); Zola, in an hour becoming
the most unpopular writer in France after his memorable J'accuse, a
fugitive from his home, the defender of a seemingly hopeless cause;
Zola dead, Dreyfus exonerated, and the powdered bones of Z