might be added.

But from one point of view, as an authority above all earlier
authorities, and from another as a sinner beyond all earlier sinners,
might be quoted Victor Hugo, even putting his _juvenilia_ aside. He had
flung a whole glossary of architecture, not to mention other things of
similar kind, into _Notre Dame de Paris_; and when after a long interval
he resumed prose fiction, he had ransacked the encyclopaedia for _Les
Miserables_. _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ is half a great poem and half
a _real-lexikon_ of mechanics, weather-lore, seafaring, ichthyology, and
God knows what else! If _L'Homme Qui Rit_ had been written a very little
later, parts of it might have been taken as a deliberate burlesque, by a
French Sir Francis Burnand, of Naturalist method. Now, as the most acute
literary historians have always seen, Naturalism was practically
nothing but a degeneration of Romanticism:[469] and degeneracy always
shows itself in exaggeration. Naturalism exaggerated detail, streak of
tulip, local colour, and all the rest, of which Romanticism had made
such good use at its best. But what it exaggerated most of all was the
Romantic neglect of classical _decorum_, in the wider as well as the
narrower sense of that word. Classicism had said, "Keep everything
indecorous out." Naturalism seemed sometimes to say, "Let nothing that
is not indecorous come in."[470]

[Sidenote: Survey of books--the short stories.]

It was, however, by no means at first that M. Zola took to the
"document" or elaborated the enormous scheme of the Rougon-Macquart
cycle: though whether the excogitation of this was or was not due to the
frequentation, exhortation, and imitation of MM. de Goncourt is not a
point that we need discuss. He began, after melodramatic and negligible
_juvenilia_, in 1864 with a volume of delightful short stories,[471]
_Contes a Ninon_, in which kind he long afterwards showed undiminished
powers. And he continued this practice at intervals for a great number
of years, with results collected, after the first set, in _Nouveaux
Contes a Ninon_, and in volumes taking their general titles from special
tales--_Le Capitaine Burle_ and _Nais Micoulin_. In 1880 he gave the
first story, _L'Attaque du Moulin_, to that most remarkable Naturalist
"symposium," _Les Soirees de Medan_, which, if nothing of it survived
but that story itself and Maupassant's _Boule de Suif_, and if this
represented the sole extant work of the School, w