oks. He was, using the
phrase in its real sense, the "grand vulgariser" of those finished,
though somewhat remote artists. To the Goncourts fame came slowly; it
was by a process of elimination rather than through the voluntary
offering of popular esteem. And it is not to be denied that Madame
Bovary owed much of its early success to the fact that its author was
prosecuted for an outrage against public morals--poor Emma Bovary
whose life, as Henry James once confessed, might furnish a moral for a
Sunday-school class. Thus fashions in books wax and wane. Zola copied
and "vulgarised" Charles de Mailly, Manette Salomon, Germinie
Lacerteux (Charles Monselet saluted the book with the amiable title
"sculptured slime"), Madame Gervasais--for his Roman story---Soeur
Philomene, all by Goncourt, and he literally founded his method on
Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale, particularly upon the
latter, the greatest, and one is tempted to say the most genuine
realistic novel ever written. Its grey colouring, its daylight
atmosphere, its marvellous description of Fontainebleau, of
masquerades, of dinners and duels in high and low life, its lifelike
characters, were for Zola a treasure-trove. He took Rosanette, the
most lifelike cocotte in fiction, and transformed her into Nana, into
a symbol of destruction. Zola saw the world through melodramatic eyes.

Mr. Massis has noted Zola's method of literary travail, the formation
of his style, the labour of style, the art of writing, the pain of
writing, and his infinitely painstaking manner of accumulating heaps
of notes, and building his book from them. The Massis study, the most
complete of its kind, may interest the student, not alone of Zola, but
of literature in general. Not, however, as a model, for Zola, with all
his tiresome preparations, never constructed an ideal book--rather, to
put it the other way, no one of his books reveals ideal construction.
The multiplicity of details, of descriptions weary the reader. A
coarse spirit his, he revelled in scenes of lust, bloodshed, vileness,
and cruelty.

His people, with a few exceptions, are but agitated silhouettes. You
close your eyes after reading La Bete Humaine and think of Eugene Sue,
a Sue of 1880. Yet a master of broad, symphonic descriptions. There is
a certain resemblance to Richard Wagner; indeed, he patterned after
Wagner in his use of the musical symbol: there is a leading motive in
each of Zola's novels. And like Wagn