y. We shall speak later of the excellence of his short stories;
if he had never written anything else there would be hardly anything but
praise for him. When he does not lose himself in the wilderness of
particulars, he sometimes manages to rise from it to wonderful
Pisgah-sights of description. He has a really vast, though never an
absolute or consummate, and always a morbid, hold on what may be called
the second range of character, and a drastic, if rather mechanical,
faculty of combining scenes and incidents. The mass of the
Rougon-Macquart books is very much more coherent than the _Comedie
Humaine_. He has real pathos. But perhaps his greatest quality, shown at
intervals throughout but never fully developed till the chaotic and
sometimes almost Blake-like Apocalypses of his last stage, was a
grandiosity of fancy--nearly reaching imagination, and not incapable of
dressing itself in suitable language--which, though one traces some
indebtedness to Lamennais and Michelet and Hugo, has sufficient
individuality, and, except in these four, is very rarely found in French
literature later than the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. To set
against these merits--still leaving the main fault alone--there are some
strange defects. Probably worst of all, for it has its usual appalling
pervasiveness, is his almost absolute want of humour. Humour and
Naturalism, indeed, could not possibly keep house together; as we shall
see in Maupassant, the attempt has happier results than in the case of
"Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell," for the fairy expels the Devil
at times wholly. The minor and particular absurdities which result from
this want of humour crop up constantly in the books; and it is said to
have been taken advantage of by Maupassant himself in one instance, the
disciple "bamming" the master into recording the existences of
peculiarly specialised places of entertainment, which the fertile fancy
of the author of _Boule de Suif_ had created.

[Sidenote: The Pillars of Naturalism.]

The Naturalist Novel, as practised by Zola, rests on three principal
supports, or rather draws its materials from, and guides its
treatment by, three several processes or doctrines. The general
observational-experimental theory of the Goncourts is very widely, in
fact almost infinitely extended, "documents" being found or made in or
out of the literal farrago of all occupations and states of life. But,
as concerns the definitely "human" part